Leave the Light Burning
by Fluffy-CSI
Summary: Epilogue up. Angsty goodness. Alex and Bobby are in a relationship, but things just don't work out like they're supposed to. BA, WIP
1. The sickness

A/N: Ok, so I was craving angst and happened to listen to the song "A Light in Your Eyes" by Blessid Union of Souls. Voila, an angst fic loosely based on those lyrics. So grab a box of tissues and read on ;)

* * *

In the hours just before dawn, the bedroom was always steeped in darkness, and it was in those hours, on this day, that she realized that she simply couldn't hold on any longer. It had been six months since she gave in and let herself tumble into a relationship with her partner - six long, hard months, both at work and at home. She felt like she'd been clawing at the ground to keep her sense of self from sliding off a cliff, and she was, quite simply, exhausted.

She glanced at the man lying next to her in bed. He was still asleep, as she'd known he would be. She was the one who enjoyed watching the faint light trickle gently through the blinds that covered the windows of his apartment; Bobby had never quite understood how she could willingly wake up to watch the sun rise, but bitch and moan about getting up to go to work an hour later. She couldn't really explain it to him, considering that she didn't know how to explain it to herself. It was just that the sunrise brought . . . silence. Explosions of color. Peace.

Peace. Yeah, that. Lately, these few minutes in the morning were the only times she _could _feel at peace in her life. The rest of the day, she was fighting one battle or another.

It wasn't that she didn't like her job, because she did, and it wasn't that she didn't like her partner, because she liked him too. Goren had always gone out of his way to make her happy, whether that entailed something as trivial as bringing in an extra donut in the morning or something as hair-raising as meeting her parents. In fact, she had a sneaking suspicion that she actually _loved _her partner.

The day she'd realized that, she'd cried.

Because it didn't matter. The relationship wasn't working. It didn't matter how much she loved him, because she simply couldn't get along with him any longer. She'd always believed that when she found a man she really loved, things would just . . . magically work out. Or, at worst, she'd just buckle down and work a little harder to maintain the relationship.

The problem was, she'd been buckling down for months, and things were no better. At some point when she wasn't looking - she thought it had been around their third month as a couple - her easygoing, gentle partner had turned into a secretive, distant man she didn't know.

She looked again at his sleeping form and fought the urge to just cuddle up to him and try to forget her unhappiness. No, she'd tried pushing the problem out of her mind before, and it had always just forced its way back in within a few days. Tolerance of his flaws could only take her so far, that was what her mother had told her the night Alex had broken down and blurted out the whole story. _Accepting everything unkind he does, just for the sake of keeping the peace . . . Alex, honey, that's not happiness_, her mother had whispered as she watched her tough, strong-willed daughter cover her face and cry. _That's just . . . setting yourself up to be hurt even more. You need to take care of yourself before you try to take care of him._

She didn't want to do this. She didn't want to be yet another person who gave up on Bobby Goren; he didn't deserve that.

But she didn't deserve to be snapped at daily, to have her emotional reserves completely drained because she had to care for him as well as herself, to not be able to find peace in her own home when he was there.

He would be angry. At least, he'd make it look that way. She was pretty sure, though, that underneath the facade, he would be berating himself for driving her away, analyzing and re-analyzing the things he'd said and done in an attempt to identify what had gone wrong so he could try to fix it.

The problem was, it wasn't fixable. At least, not by her alone, and he'd given no indication that he even knew anything was wrong with their relationship, let alone that he wanted to put any energy into fixing it.

Next to her, Bobby rolled over, ending up with his face against the small of her back as she sat on the edge of the bed. Thankful that she'd thought to get dressed a few minutes ago instead of leaving it until he awoke, she carefully twisted around to look at him up, trying not to jar him too much. "Bobby?"

"Hmm?" He didn't open his eyes as one of his hands slid under her shirt and up her back.

Alex pulled away from him and stood up. "Bobby, wake up. I need to talk to you."

His eyes stayed closed as he mumbled, "I'm listening."

"Damn it, I'm serious. Would you at least _pretend _to have some interest in what I have to say?"

He opened his eyes and raised an eyebrow. "Someone's cranky this morning."

The urge to just walk out right then and there grew stronger, and she had to remind herself that underneath his sarcasm, there was a man she loved. She needed to at least _try _to explain herself to him before she left. "Bobby, please. Just listen to me for a minute, ok? Then you can go back to sleep or whatever."

With a sigh, he rolled onto his back and looked up at her. "Ok, you have my attention. Is something wrong?"

"I . . ." Oh god, in those last few words she'd heard the old him. She couldn't decide whether she wanted to fall into the arms of the man who asked so kindly if something was wrong, or run from the man who was more interested in sleep than in what she had to say.

"Alex?" he prompted worriedly, sitting up and moving to the edge of the bed. Reaching out to take her hand, he said after a second, "Something _is _wrong. Tell me."

"I . . ." she tried again, frustrated at not being able to get the words out. "I don't think this is working, Bobby."

He looked at her blankly. "You don't think _what's _working?"

"Us." This was too hard. She couldn't look at his face while she did this. Biting her lip, she turned her back to him. "I've been trying . . . so hard . . . but it's just . . . it's not working."

There was complete silence from the man on the bed for a few seconds. "You're talking about . . . you and me?" he finally said jerkily. "This?"

She nodded. "It's . . . I don't know. I loved the Bobby you used to be, but now you're someone completely different, and I . . . I can't deal with him. I just can't, no matter how hard I try."

"I'm still me, Alex."

She could hear how tightly he was controlling his voice, trying not to show her what he was feeling. "Maybe to you, you are. But to me . . . look, Bobby, just . . ." She broke off on a defeated sigh. "You have no idea how much I wish I didn't have to do this. You're . . . you're my best friend, and my partner, and I value those more than you can imagine. I just . . . can't let myself be in love with you anymore."

"_Why?" _he said sharply. "Alex, tell me what I did! I can . . ."

She shook her head, not letting him finish his sentence. "No, I'm starting to think you really can't." Damn, she needed to get out of here before she started crying, but before she could run, she needed to face him down. And so she turned back around to where he was still sitting on the bed. "Bobby, listen to me," she ordered quietly, taking his face in her hands. "Maybe I'm wrong, ok? I hope I am. I hope I go into work Monday morning and find the old Bobby sitting across from me. And if that happens, believe me, I'm going to take back every word I've said this morning and beg you to forgive me. But right now . . ." She swallowed and pulled her hands back. "Right now it's hurting me more to be _in_ this relationship than to not be in it."

Bobby had gone very still, she realized as she watched him. His eyes were on her, but his hands were fisted on his lap and he was sitting ramrod straight. "You don't want to be here with me?" he said after a second, his voice low and dangerous and his face hardening. "Fine. You can get out."

"Bobby, please! Did you even hear a word I just said?" she protested as she watched him point one long finger to the door. "I'm telling you that I lo-"

"I believe I told you to get out," he interrupted her coldly. "I ruined the relationship, you don't love me . . . You've made your points. So leave."

She looked at him, searching his face for the Bobby she loved and finding no trace of him. "I'm going," she sighed as he continued to just stare her down. "I just wish I knew what happened to the real Bobby. Maybe you should start looking for him under all that ice."

"I said, get _out_!"

TBC . . .


	2. The cause

Bobby allowed himself to fume for half the day before finally admitting to himself that she had been right. He _had _changed, toward her and nearly everyone else who cared about him, in the past few months. He hadn't been aware of it at the time, and he certainly hadn't intended to do it, but it had happened all the same. And all because of one short phone call.

Three months ago, Pine Brook Medical Center in Los Angeles had called to inform him that his mother had been accepted into the clinical trial of a new anti-psychotic drug. He'd forgotten he even submitted an application for the trial in question; after ten years of consistently being rejected, he usually forgot about applications almost as soon as he sent them in, knowing that he was just going through the motions.

If his mother was going to LA, so was he. At least, that's the way he'd always assumed it would work, if and when the day came that she got a chance. He wouldn't abandon her to a bunch of strangers.

But that was before he let himself fall in love with his partner here in New York. If anyone had asked him before that phone call whether he would voluntarily leave Alex, he would have . . . well, he probably would have looked at them like they'd grown another head. Of course he wasn't going to leave her, not when it had taken so long to find her!

It had never occurred to him that he might have to choose between the two women in his life, and when Pine Brook had called and the choice had been forced upon him, he had tried to avoid making a decision as long as possible. He'd been turning the problem over and over in his mind for months now, and obviously his partner had noticed that something was wrong - _very _wrong. Had he really been treating her that badly?

_You screamed at her to get out of your apartment_, his conscience reminded him. _That's not exactly a recommended method of courtship_.

God, he'd screwed up. Without even realizing it, he'd managed to do the one thing he wanted most desperately not to do: he'd driven her away. Somehow she'd taken the abuse for three months - looking back, he knew she must have given him second chance after second chance before finally reaching her breaking point, but now she was done with him, and he couldn't blame her in the slightest.

She had been trying to reassure him even as he forced her out out his life, he remembered, allowing himself a smile. How very Alex, to try to soften the blow.

The hell of it was that now that he'd kicked his partner out of his life, there was only one choice left of the original two. His parting with Alex had been, well, less than friendly. Even if she'd been telling the truth about wanting to fix things with the "old" him, the fact was that he couldn't give her what she wanted - he didn't even know who the "old" him _was_ any longer. With this blow-up hanging over his head, working side-by-side with her would be . . . difficult, at best. He didn't want to put her through any more than he already had, so maybe being gone was the best thing he could do for her right now.

Bobby was going to Los Angeles.

* * *

She let him into her apartment with only a wary look as a reminder of how he'd treated her the day before. He wondered as he slowly stepped inside if she knew that most women - and, probably, most men - wouldn't blame her if she had just slammed the door in his face. 

"What are you doing here?" she asked matter-of-factly. "I was under the impression that my face wasn't exactly on the top of your list of things you wanted to see."

"I . . ." He swallowed. "I need to apologize to you."

Alex cocked her head to the side and scrutinized her partner/non-boyfriend. He looked tired, but then, that wasn't unusual for him. Still there was something . . . something that seemed _changed _about him, if she could only put her finger on it. "Ok," she said with a shrug. "If you feel like you need to. It's not like you weren't provoked, though. Don't feel too bad."

He tried not to gape at her. Did the woman have a halo she'd been hiding from him? She was trying to equate his screaming fit with her quiet "goodbye" speech? "That's not true, and we both know it," he managed, looking away from her. "You . . . I was completely in the wrong. I'm well aware of that now that I've had time to cool down."

The difference, she realized now, was that he was . . . talking to her. Really, truly talking, and trying to explain what was going on in his head. It had been months since he'd bothered to do that for her. "Why now, Bobby?"

"Pardon?" he said, confused at her apparent non sequitur.

"One argument can't change a person's personality. I . . . why are you suddenly apologizing and talking to me like this, when a week ago, you wouldn't have seen the need to apologize at all?"

Bobby sighed. He ought to have known that his partner wasn't one to beat around the bush. "I'm sorry . . . for how I was. Yesterday, I . . . you made me think back, and I realized you were right. I was withdrawing."

"Well that's nice and all," she said pointedly, "but I asked _why_, not _what_."

"I've been . . . preoccupied. Stuff about my mother," he said, awkwardly rubbing the back of his neck as he spoke. "I . . . had to make some big decisions, and I didn't want to make them. I guess maybe I took it out on you."

"Your . . . is she ok?" Alex asked, a look of concern washing the irritated expression off her face.

He held up a hand to stave off her worried questions. "She's fine. She . . . she might be even more fine soon. She's been accepted into a clinical trial, and -"

"Bobby, that's great! You've been trying to get her into one of those for years! What are they testing?"

"It's . . . a new anti-psychotic. Tests on animals look promising, so the FDA approved human testing. But Alex, there's -"

"Is it one of the ones at Columbia?" she cut him off. "They run a lot, right?"

He put his hand into his coat pocket so he could clench his fist without her seeing. "No, not Columbia. It's . . . it's at a clinic run by the UCLA medical school."

She blinked. "UCLA? How is she going to get there? Can she travel?"

"Please . . ." he said, motioning for her to be quiet. "Don't. Just . . . let me talk."

She nodded, keeping her wide eyes on his face. Something was coming. Something he didn't like. Whatever it was, she was pretty sure she wasn't going to like it, either.

"She can travel as long as she has someone with her," he explained quietly. "That's me. I'm going with her. The trial . . . its length is indefinite. It could be weeks, it could be years . . ." He stopped to steel himself as understanding began to show on her face. "I . . . have some friends on the job there and I'm . . . the LAPD offered me a temporary position, for however long I need it."

Her eyes still glued to his face, Alex felt behind her for the kitchen chair she knew was there. Finding it after a few seconds, she lowered herself into it without looking away from him. "You're . . . leaving? Your mother . . . Bobby . . ." she stammered, then gave up and dropped her head into her hands. "You're moving to Los Angeles."

Wishing desperately that he knew how to read her reaction, he nodded even though he knew she couldn't see it. "Not . . . permanently, but the amount of time . . . I don't know."

"This is what's had you so upset the last few months?" she asked, the words muffled by her hands. "Bobby, why didn't you . . . damn it, how could you do this?" She jerked her head up then and fixed a hot glare on him. "I thought you felt like you could tell me anything. I . . . this whole time . . ." She stopped, swallowing hard, and lowered her eyes again.

"Alex, I -"

She shook her head before he could finish the apology. "I think you should . . . go," she told him weakly, waving a hand to the door. "I . . . I hope your mother does good there, I really do, but I . . . can't deal with this right now. Please, go."

Unwilling to leave her after having upset her so much, he moved closer to her instead. "Please, listen to me. I -"

"Go!" she shouted, then found herself embarrassed to hear her voice tremble on the word. God, she couldn't take any more of this without screaming, or crying, or both; she needed to escape. "Go, Bobby," she repeated as she jumped to her feet and headed for her bedroom. "Enjoy California."

Her words were punctuated by the soft _click _of her bedroom door closing.

TBC . . .

* * *

A/N: Yeah, so I'm not even positive that UCLA has a med school, and there's certainly no Pine Brook clinic, so just . . . go on and suspend that disbelief! 


	3. Primary symptoms

A/N: Hmm. This fic is getting interesting to write. I spent most of the day writing a chapter centering on Bobby, then sat down tonight and realized that I needed to have a chapter about Alex's feelings first. So now I've got a chapter that I don't know where to put . . .

* * *

He'd been gone for a week. She hadn't tried to stop him - after all, she didn't want to deny his mother treatment no matter what she wanted from Bobby himself - and he'd really done it. For a few days she'd allowed herself to think that maybe he'd change his mind once he was had gotten his mother was well-settled in LA, but the time for that to have happened was past.

She didn't know what to feel. At first it had been shock, then anger at his secret-keeping. Pity next, at how he must have felt struggling with the decision for so long, then resentment for the shabby way he'd treated her in lieu of telling her the truth. The resentment was followed by a feeling of surreality - was this really her life that had suddenly been turned into a soap opera gone wrong? - and then a dull depression as she realized that it _was _real, that he was gone and she was here and there was no more "Goren and Eames."

"Alex, come on."

Pulled from her thoughts, she hugged the pillow she was holding tighter to her chest and looked up at her younger sister, Maggie, who was curled up at the other end of the couch. "What?"

"I said 'come on'! You need to snap out of this. Let's get drunk and go bar-hopping or something." When that got no response, Maggie leaned closer, getting into her sister's face. "Alex, he treated you like shit for months! Stop being sorry he's gone, damn it."

Alex shook her head tiredly. "Not going to happen, sorry. Just let me mope, would you?"

"No." She abruptly jumped to her feet and headed for Alex's kitchen. "At the very least, you and me are going to sit here, together, and mope _with _ice cream."

That got a weak smile out of her. "I never say no to ice cream." She watched Maggie dig through the freezer for a few seconds, then sighed. "He's not a bad person, Mags. He just . . . didn't know how to handle the problem, and he did it wrong."

"And that's supposed to make me feel better . . . why?" Maggie said, turning around with a carton of double-fudge brownie ice cream in her hands. "As far as I'm concerned, 'bad' and 'hurting my sister for no good reason whatsoever' are the same thing. Spoons?"

"Second drawer on the left. I didn't talk to him, you know, after he told he. I threw him out and then screened my calls until the day he left."

"Sounds reasonable to me. I'm surprised you didn't kick the shit out of him before you threw him out."

Alex shrugged and accepted the ice cream carton from her sister, prying off the lid. "I was too busy being completely stunned and speechless."

They ate in silence for a few minutes before Maggie made her next attempt: "You think he's going to try to call you or anything?"

"I . . . probably. Eventually."

"Are you going to talk to him if he does?"

She shook her head. "No. At least, not for the time being. Not until I can carry on a conversation with him without yelling at him or crying."

Maggie hastily swallowed a bite of ice cream and waved her spoon emphatically at her sister as she said, "I swear to god, Alex, you've cried more tears over this guy in the past . . . what, five months? than you did in your entire life before that. Take it from me: don't get into the habit. Crying doesn't fix anything, but it sure makes you look dumb to the person you're crying over."

"I know. Believe me, I know. I just . . . don't know what else to do, you know? It's either cry or scream, and crying's less likely to get me evicted."

"How about you do _neither_," Maggie said forcefully as she dug her spoon into the carton for more ice cream. "Stop being hurt and start being angry. Better yet, stop caring about him and what he did in the first place."

"Yeah, well, you got an instruction manual for that? Because I'm kind of having a hard time turning 'I love Bobby' into 'Bobby who?' even though I would love to get it all out of my head."

"I'm guessing a rebound boyfriend isn't the way you want to go?" Maggie teased. "Because I have more than one male friend who'd love to get your number."

Alex shook her head. "Ugh, no. Nothing against your friends or anything, but just . . . no. I'm . . . not interested. Come on, Mags, help me think of stuff that's constructive, stuff that I can actually _do_!"

"You could give me your gun and tell me where to find him."

"Maggie."

Maggie held up her hands in surrender. "Ok, ok. Sorry. Although I would like nothing better than to do just that. What kind of 'constructive' are you looking for? You want me to tell you to take up a new hobby or something?"

"I don't know. Just . . . get him out of my head, however you can."

"Ok . . ." She pursed her lips and thought for a few seconds. "Well, you could focus on work. I mean, you're getting a new partner and everything now, right? That's going to take up a lot of your energy."

Sighing, Alex shook her head. "I'm getting paired up with an old warhorse named Webster. With Bobby gone, I'm not at the top of the pecking order anymore; I don't think work's going to be that challenging in the near future."

"There you go again! 'Bobby' this, 'Bobby' that . . . did you miss the memo about how _you're _a damn good cop, completely independent of him? God," she said, shaking her head wonderingly, "I can't believe how much he got to you."

"I loved him, Mags," Alex said softly. "I still do, even after this. When you love someone, you let them get to you. It's part of the process."

Maggie rolled her eyes. "With lines like that, maybe you should give up police work and start writing romance novels. Fine, ok, you loved him. That doesn't mean you should let yourself be devalued because he's gone." She sighed. "Are you _sure _you don't want to give me his address?"

Alex just gave her sister a tired look. "What pisses me off is that I let him see how much the thought of him leaving messed me up."

"Pride took a hit, huh?"

"In a big way."

"Good. Use it."

"I beg your pardon?" Alex said blankly. "How do I use something like that?"

"You let him see you weak once, and now - oops, wait," Maggie broke off. "The ice cream's melting. I'll put it back." Taking the container back from her sister, she stood up and walked to the kitchen, saying over her shoulder, "You let him see you weak once. Now what you're going to do is make sure he doesn't get to see it again. Be ready for any stunts he might pull, like calling you, or whatever it is nutjobs like him do - sending you a card written in blood . . . whatever."

"He's not a 'nutjob.' I've told you that a million times," she protested weakly as she followed Maggie into the kitchen.

"Not my point." She shoved the ice cream back into the freezer. "I'm saying that if you don't know what's going to happen if you have to deal with him again, you need to do some contingency planning."

"Contingency planning?" Alex echoed, dropping both spoons into the sink. "Ok, I'm listening."

"Good girl. Now, the you have two goals here: first, to not give him the satisfaction of seeing you're hurting, and second, to get rid of the hurt for real. For obvious reasons, we're going to start with the first one."

Alex didn't comment on that as they returned to the couch and settled down; she just picked up her pillow and hugged it again.

Maggie raised her eyebrows pointedly at the pillow, but didn't try to take it away from her. "Now, he's not a stupid guy, right? Unfortunately?"

" 'Stupid' is definitely not a word anyone in their right mind would apply to Bobby Goren," Alex agreed.

"Right, that's what I'm saying." Looking pointedly at the cell phone clipped to her sister's belt, she went on, "He knows you carry that phone. He knows it's always on you, and he knows that if you don't answer, odds are that it's because you're avoiding whoever's calling, not because you didn't hear the phone ring. So if he calls, you're going to answer."

"Maggie -"

"Let me finish," Maggie insisted, holding up a hand to cut off Alex's protest. "Now, as I said, you're going to answer the phone. You're going to talk to him. That does _not _mean that you have to let him control the conversation, though, ok? You make small talk, ask how he's been, all that stuff, so it's clear that you're not afraid of talking to him. And then, if he tries to turn the conversation somewhere you don't want to go, or if you just can't put up with him any longer, you make an excuse. Say . . . I don't know, that your partner needs you or something."

Alex, looking unsatisfied, shrugged. "And this helps me . . . how?"

"Well it makes you feel like you're getting back at him, for one thing. I don't know about you, but that always makes me feel better - especially when you're doing it in a way he can't point to and say, 'oh, she's overcompensating.'"

" 'Overcompensating'?" she repeated dubiously. "If you say so."

"Just work with me on this, Al, ok?"

"Whatever you say, _Mags_."

Maggie stopped to stick out her tongue before continuing, "Believe it or not, if you pretend you're not upset long enough, it kind of becomes second nature, and then you wake up one day and realize that hey . . . you're _not _really that upset anymore. And that point's a lot easier to get to when you know you're keeping your dignity while you do it."

"Hmm." Alex sighed and looked away. "Maggie?"

Concerned by her sister's sudden change in tone, Maggie looked closely at her as she said, "What?"

"What do you think would have happened if, instead of yelling at him, I had offered to go with him?"

She let out a troubled breath and moved to the other end of the couch to hug Alex. "Oh, honey, don't think about that. You can't change what's done."

Alex shook her head againsther shoulder. "Tell me anyway. I . . . I can't figure out if it would have made things better or worse."

"You really want to know my opinion? Even if it's not what you want to hear?"

"Yes."

She sighed. "I think if you had done that, you wouldn't have needed to kick him out, because he would have gotten the hell out of there as soon as he heard you say it. Alex, come on, it doesn't do any good to play the 'what if?' game."

She pulled away from Maggie's hug to bury her face in the pillow and mumble something unintelligible.

"What?" Maggie asked, leaning over to get her ear closer. "I didn't hear you."

She turned her head slightly so her mouth wasn't covered. "I said . . ." She paused to swallow as a tear ran down her cheek to soak into the pillowcase. "I said that . . . I should have learned years ago that 'happily ever after' wasn't going to happen for me."

"Oh, Alex . . . Don't blame yourself for something _he_ ruined. If he were really as smart as people think he is, he would have done whatever he could to keep you with him." And with that, Maggie wrapped her arms around her sister, pillow and all, and held her as she cried.


	4. Probing the wound

A/N: Yeah, so this was the Bobby chapter from yesterday. I figured it fits as well here as anywhere, because I don'thave nearly enough angst to actually fill up the six months that pass between the last chapter and this one. 

_

* * *

Six months later . . ._

Frances Goren's room at the Pine Brook Medical Center appeared homey today, with the daylight streaming through the open window and splashing across the pages of the book she was holding as she sat in her rocking chair. Her bed was made with real sheets and blankets, ones her son had gone out to buy the day she mentioned how thin and scratchy hospital sheets were, and she was dressed in street clothes rather than the shapeless sweats or hospital gowns many of her neighbors wore every day. And as if those things weren't enjoyable enough, her son had brought her non-hospital food - McDonalds, to be specific - for lunch today.

Yes, she was pleased to have these things, to not be stuck in an impersonal institution like so many she'd been in before, but what pleased Frances even more was that she was actually able to sit calmly and appreciate what she had. A clear mind had come to feel like a luxury to her - something that floated in every now and then, and soon enough floated away again no matter how hard she tried to hold onto it - and the fact that this state had persisted now for two months was almost beyond her comprehension. She didn't have any illusions about staying this way for any substantial amount of time -experience had taught her that she couldn't sustain her lucid state when left to her own devices - but she was thankful for the time she had now, today. The ability to sit and talk with one's child was not to be taken for granted.

And as she sat, alternately talking to him and inhaling a cheeseburger, she could see that he was unhappy. Bobby had trouble maintaining happiness the same way she had trouble maintaining mental clarity, and, as he did so often for her, she owed it to him now to sit, listen, and try to help. "Robert," she finally said, putting down the remnants of her lunch and reaching out to take his hand, "tell me, do you ever . . . go out? Do fun things? Have you made any friends here, since you left New York?"

He looked taken aback by the question for a moment, then quickly shifted his eyes away from her, looking out at the small garden visible through the window of her room. "Mom . . ." he said, shrugging. "We're here so you can get treatment, not so I can make friends."

"I'm schizophrenic, Bobby, not senile," she reminded him sharply. "I know avoidance when I hear it. Answer my question."

With a sigh, he looked back at her and shook his head. "I'm not interested in going out and doing things. I spend my free time here, with you, or working. I don't see a problem with that."

"Of course you don't. You also don't think you deserve to have anyone care about you. And you're wrong on both."

"It's not a matter of what I think I deserve," he protested. "It's just . . . the way the timing worked out. I have . . . more important concerns right now than making friends."

Her mind was still foggy in a lot of places, and she second-guessed her every thought for fear that the delusions might be creeping back, but she knew her son well enough to know she had seen something in his eyes when he responded to her question. "Do you ever speak to your friends in New York?" she pressed, searching for the sore spot she thought she'd hit. "Or to your old partner?"

Unprepared for that salvo, he jerked violently and dropped her hand. "I . . . no. We . . . we don't have that much in, uh, in common anymore."

"You may be across the country, but you're both police officers, Bobby. Things haven't changed _that _much. What's the real reason you don't talk to her?" She paused, trying to think. "It was a 'her,' right? Amy . . . Anne . . . something like that?"

"Alex," he supplied reluctantly. "She's sent you a couple cards, remember? And we just didn't part on . . . very good terms. Not the kind of thing that would keep the lines of communication open." Before she could comment on that, as he knew she would, he quickly stood up and added, "I've got to get going. I told my partner I'd only take an hour for lunch. I'm going to be cutting it close."

"Robert." She said his name in a tone he hadn't heard since childhood - a tone that warned him that he was pressing his luck and he'd better watch his step - and he was torn between the urge to smile at the reassertion of her old self or run from the sharp-witted woman who'd obviously heard more in his words than he'd wanted to let her hear.

"Yes, Mom?" he sighed, moving toward the door even as he said it.

"It's hard enough to make good friends the first time around. Don't push away the ones you've got." Her point made, she gave him a gentle smile. "Enjoy the rest of your day, sweetheart."

xxxx

His partner, Riley, wasn't at his desk when Bobby returned to the squad room that afternoon. Thankful for the respite - Riley was a nice guy and he tolerated Bobby's idiosyncrasies with little fuss, but he never stopped talking - Bobby sat down, stole a quick glance around the rest of the room to make sure no one was too close to him, and opened his portfolio.

Safely stowed in a clear plastic sleeve at the front of the binder was a picture of her. It was a few years old, from well before they'd been anything other than partners, and looking at it always made him think of the light-hearted sarcasm she had been so full of before . . . well, before things went wrong. It had been taken by her brother at some family dinner or another, and when he'd seen it after it was developed and asked her if he could have a copy, she'd told him he was welcome to it.

In it, Alex and her older sister were hanging upside-down by their knees from the monkey-bars at a playground near her parents' house. Both women were grinning like fools, not caring in that moment that they were both thirty years past monkey-bar age, or that all the blood was rushing to their faces, or that their hair was brushing the sawdust-covered ground.

By the time he'd kicked her out of his apartment six months ago, that playful, fearless Alex had gone into hiding.

"That your girlfriend?" asked a voice over his shoulder.

Startled, Bobby slammed the portfolio closed and looked up at his temporary partner, who held out a cup of coffee and looked pointedly at the portfolio. "Thank you," Bobby managed, accepting the coffee. "And no."

"I've been wondering what you keep in there," Riley commented as he circled around to his own desk. "You don't exactly hide it, but somehow you still keep people from seeing it. If it's full of pictures like that, I can see why. Don't want anyone poaching on girls that pretty."

"It's . . . not anyone important," Bobby said with a shake of his head. "Sorry about being late from lunch."

"Eh, no problem," Riley said, waving his hand dismissively. "Nothing good happens around here between twelve and one, anyway. Well, except the mail. And speaking of which, your mother got another card." Plucking a brightly-colored envelope out from under the stack of mail on his desk, he slid it across to Bobby. "I don't know what she's sick with, but whatever it is, if it gets her this many cards and letters, I want it too."

Bobby ignored that as he picked up the envelope and checked the address. It had been sent to _Mrs_. _Frances Goren, c/o Robert Goren_, from _Ms._ _Alexandra Eames_. In the months after he and his mother had moved, Alex had taken to sending Frances a card every week or two, even though he knew she knew that Frances probably didn't remember the single time they'd met. The cards never contained long messages - the last one had just said _Hope things are going well_ - and they never, ever said a word about him except for using his name in the mailing address. This one was no different, he saw as he pulled out the card. A picture of an old man in a hospital gown on the front, a short inscription on the inside, this time a joke: _I bet the hospital food is terrible, but where else are you going to get to see so many men's butts in one place? _He choked on a laugh when he read it, wondering what his mother was going to make of the humor.

"Everything ok over there, Goren?" Riley said, looking up from his day planner to see why his partner was making strange noises. "And by the way, who _is _this 'Alexandra' who sends so many cards?"

"No one," Bobby snapped, shoving the card into his portfolio and making a mental note to deliver it to his mother that night. "Just a friend."

"Well, your mom's got a faithful friend," Riley said with a grin. "Got to hang onto those ones when you find them."

Bobby just grunted, wondering why his mother had picked today to interrogate him about his social life and why his temporary partner had had to phrase his comment just the right - well, wrong - way on the same day.

"You sure you don't want to tell me about the girls in that picture?" Riley pressed when he realized that Bobby was trying to ignore him. "Because I'll take whichever one you don't want."

"Her sister's married," he snapped without thinking.

Riley raised his eyebrows, looking intrigued now. "Who's the 'her,' and which one is she?"

"She . . . she's no one. Forget it." He dropped the portfolio into a drawer and slammed it shut.

Unfortunately for Bobby, verbosity and intelligence weren't mutually exclusive, and Riley was smart enough to connect the two "no one"s Bobby had mentioned. "Is she the 'no one' whose name is Alexandra, by any chance?"

He wished he hadn't already slammed the drawer, because he would have loved to slam it again, even harder this time.

"Hmm, 'Alexandra,'" Riley repeated to himself when Bobby's reaction clearly showed that he'd hit the nail on the head. "Sounds exotic. So, she's not married?"

"Drop it, Riley."

"You know," he went on, ignoring the warning implicit in Bobby's tone, "for a girl who's just a friend of your mom's, you certainly seem very . . . possessive of her. You sure she's not anything else to you?"

"I said drop it, Riley. Now, before I decide to _make_ you drop it."

"Hey, ok," he replied placatingly. "I was just askin'. Go on and keep her a secret if it makes you happy; we got work to do this afternoon."

_If it makes me happy_? Bobby thought to himself ten minutes later as he divvied up a pile of phone dumps between Riley and himself_. No, it damn well doesn't make me happy, but what else am I supposed to do? If she'd forgiven me, she'd have called . . . and she hasn't._

TBC . . .


	5. Comorbidity

It had been exactly a year now, and still no contact from Alex except for the cards she sent his mother. He had resolved back when he first moved that he wouldn't push her, that he'd only contact her if she gave him some sign that she wanted to be contacted, but he didn't think he could hold onto that resolution much longer.

As in, much longer than the next thirty seconds, he admitted to himself as, as if of their own volition, his left hand grabbed a pen and his right hand opened his portfolio to a blank page.

_Dear Alex, _he wrote, telling himself as he did it that she didn't want to hear from him, she wasn't going to appreciate his sending her something she hadn't asked him to send . . . why was he letting himself do this?

Oh, right - because he was desperate for a word from her, no matter how unpleasant that word might end up being. So he kept writing:

_I hope you don't mind me writing to you. If you do . . . well, just don't answer this letter, and I won't bother you again._

_If you're still reading after that paragraph, I guess you're curious enough to read the rest of the letter, too. I'm really just writing to check on you, to make sure everything is going well at One PP, to make sure that you're ok. It's been . . . odd . . . to not know what you were thinking or how you were feeling, and even more, to not have the right to ask._

_Well, I guess I still don't have the right to ask, but -_

A paperclip hit him in the forehead and he looked up from what he was doing to find his partner grinning at him. "You need something?" he asked, trying not to growl at being interrupted.

"Yeah," Riley said cheerfully. "Got a question for you."

"Oh? What kind of question?" Bobby replied disinterestedly, returning his attention to the letter.

Not sounding at all apologetic for it, Riley announced loudly, "My sister wants to know if you're single."

Ok, that got his attention. Bobby looked up and stared at his partner. "Your sister . . . what?"

"She wants to know if you're single. Of course, she didn't actually _tell _me to ask you, but I got the hint from the fifty thousand times she mentioned how 'hot' my partner was."

"Hot?" he repeated doubtfully. "Riley, have I ever even _met _your sister?"

"Yeah, sure. She's been in here a couple times to say hi to me or drop stuff off. Katie - dark hair, short? Giggles a lot?"

Bobby thought about that, trying to call up a mental image of the woman. "Isn't she only in her twenties? Anyway, I'm not interested, so you can tell her I've got a girlfriend."

"Uh . . . but you don't," Riley pointed out. "Not that I'm too keen on the idea of you dating my little sister or anything, but . . . you definitely do _not_ have a girlfriend, Goren. Unless we're counting that Alexandra woman, who, as far as I can tell, you haven't spoken to in the entire time I've worked with you."

"Don't bring her into this," Bobby snapped when he recovered from the momentary shock of hearing her mentioned.

Riley snorted. "Well, maybe if I knew who she _was_, I'd know what I could and couldn't bring her into. Frankly, my friend, I'm starting to think she's just a picture you cut out of a magazine."

Bobby looked down at the letter he'd started to write, then stifled a sigh as he looked back up. "She's real, and that's all you're getting out of me about her. Tell your sister I'm gay if you don't want to say I have a girlfriend. Whatever works."

"You want me to tell her you're _gay_?" Riley asked with a disbelieving laugh. "Man, you have got some major issues if you'd rather have people think you're gay than admit that you're pining over some girl you used to know."

"I'm not p-" He stopped and shook his head. "Never mind. Just drop it, Riley."

"She's from New York, I know that much . . ."

Bobby's attention snapped back to the other man's face. "What?"

"The return address on all her cards. I'm not as stupid as you think I am."

Grinding his teeth, Bobby forced himself to hold onto his temper. "I don't think you're stupid, but I _do _think you should keep your nose out of my business. Now, can I get back to work?"

Riley leaned back in his chair and gave Bobby a considering look. "You're really going to . . . no, never mind. Yeah, I'll let it go for now if you insist."

"Thank you." Promptly forgetting Riley was there, he returned his eyes to his letter and re-read it. _It's been "odd"? _he thought as he scanned his words. _This is pathetic. I'm going to spend the whole letter hemming and hawing, and never manage to actually tell her what I'm thinking._

What the hell _was _he thinking? Well, at the moment, it was something along the lines of, _Gee, Alex, it would be really nice if you would turn down any dates you're offered, since that's what I'm doing because I can't get you out of my head._

Somehow, he didn't think she'd appreciate reading that.

God, he didn't know _what _he wanted to write! With a groan, Bobby clenched the letter in his fist, crumpling it into a ball, and tossed it toward the trash can as he stood up. "I'm leaving."

Riley looked up blankly. "You're _what_? It's only three!"

"So go tell the boss and get me fired. I'm still leaving." He didn't hang around to see what his partner actually did; within thirty seconds he had his portfolio and his coat and was heading out of the building.

* * *

With a sigh, Alex slumped over her desk and picked listlessly at the depressingly late lunch that she and Webster had only just had time to order in. "You know, orange chicken sounded really good on paper, but now . . ."

Webster, who was having no such problems with scarfing down his own lunch, swallowed a bite of his egg roll and studied her posture. "You have to eat something, Alex. Deakins'll kill me if I let you starve yourself to death."

"I'm not 'starving myself to death,'" she retorted, jabbing her plastic fork in his general direction and not even coming close to actually poking him. "I'm just . . . not that hungry."

"You weren't 'that hungry' for breakfast, either. What's gotten into you lately, kid?"

"Nothing. I'm fine." _And it's been a whole year and I'm finally being forced to accept that he's just **not** coming back. _She hadn't even had the satisfaction of the phone conversation she and Maggie had outlined so long ago, because he hadn't bothered to call or even write, not once in the whole twelve months.

"You've lost weight, you know," Webster told her, well aware that he was one of the very few people she might let get away with telling her that. "You need to start eating more - _and _you need to get a boyfriend or two."

"What's a boyfriend got to do with my weight?" she replied, returning her fork to the chicken in front of her. "One insult at a time, bud."

"They're not insults," he said, his voice suddenly becoming more serious. "You've got me worried, I'm not kidding. Tell me what's going on, Alex - maybe I can help."

She just shook her head with an ironic laugh. "Not a chance in hell. I swear to you, Pete, I'm just fine."

"No, you're not," he insisted, the stubbornness in his voice almost matching her own. "You're not happy, and I don't like to see -"

His latest attempt to get the truth out of her was cut off by the ringing of her cell phone. They both sighed, assuming it was work-related, and Alex reached down to unclip it from her belt. "Honestly, all I want is _one _afternoon where we're not -" Her voice dropped like a stone as she saw the number on the caller ID display.

"Alex?" Webster said worriedly as she continued to just stare down at the phone instead of answering it. "Are you ok?"

"I . . ." She stopped, trying to pull herself together, then jumped to her feet. "I have to go."

"You - what? Eames, your face just turned white, damn it. Sit your ass in your chair and keep it there!"

She stayed on her feet and just shook her head. "I . . . no, I have to go. Is there anyone in the conference room? I have to go." She was starting to babble and she knew it. She needed to escape the watchful eye of her partner, fast.

"Alex!" Webster called after her as he watched her flee toward the empty room and close the door behind her. "Well, hell." Now that she was in there, she wasn't going to come out until she was ready, and he wasn't going to be able to do anything to help her until she did. Reluctantly, he returned his attention to his paperwork, trying to keep one eye on his partner at the same time.

Alex glanced once more at the closed door that lay between her and the rest of the squad room, then returned her eyes to her phone. It was still ringing, and it was still displaying the same phone number - one she hadn't seen in a year. Willing her voice not to shake, she opened the phone and raised it to her ear. "Hello?"

There was silence for a second on the other end of the line, and then: "Eames?"

"Bobby," she acknowledged flatly.

"I . . . are you busy?"

She wished desperately she could say yes, but not only would that be just avoiding the issue, she was pretty sure she wouldn't be able to get the word out of her mouth. "Not at the moment, no," she managed after a second.

"Oh." He paused, waiting for her to say something else. To ask why he was calling, or to yell at him for presuming to contact her . . . anything but the blank silence that he was currently hearing. "Uh, are you still there?"

"I'm here."

"Oh. Good. I, uh . . ." Staring at the bare walls of his apartment, Bobby wondered what had possessed him to make this call, no matter how much he wanted to hear her voice. "I was wondering how . . . how you were doing."

"I'm doing just fine." She thought she was starting to get control of herself again, and as she dropped into a chair at the conference table, she went on, "How's your mother doing?"

"She . . . she's doing really good. Her symptoms are almost entirely gone. She, uh . . . appreciates the cards you've been sending."

"Mmm," Alex managed noncommittally. "That's good to hear. I can imagine how much of a relief it must be to have her back, for you and her both."

"Yeah. Yeah, it's . . . nice. But Alex," he added quickly, "I called to ask how _you _were doing. How are things at MCS?"

"Things here are fine . . . the same as always. People commit crimes, we don't sleep for a few days while we chase them . . . you know how it goes. How do you like the LAPD?"

She obviously didn't want to talk about herself. He wondered whether it was just a general reluctance, or whether there was something she didn't want him to know. "It's ok. Different, in a lot of ways, but they get things done. My partner, though . . . he, uh, doesn't hold a candle to you."

Alex drew in a quiet breath at that, then hoped he hadn't heard it. "Every partnership is different," she finally said quietly. "You wouldn't expect him to be the same kind of partner as I was."

"Well, no, that's true. He's just a partner, after all."

"Of course he's 'just' a partner," she replied coolly. "What else would a partner be to you?"

He didn't miss her implication. "Some partners are just people you work with; others are people you really . . . love."

When she hadn't replied to that after ten seconds, he got the message: she wasn't going to discuss anything related to love. "How . . . uh, how's your new partner?" he asked, searching for a more neutral topic.

"Pete's ok. It's a different dynamic than with you, is all. Well, that and he spends a lot more time than you did getting on my back about me taking care of myself. When you called just now, he was in the middle of telling me I've lost too much weight and I need to start eating more." She definitely wasn't going to mention the other part of Webster's exhortation - Bobby did _not _need to hear about how even her partner thought she needed to find a boyfriend.

Bobby felt a jolt of concern at her words. Alex had never had a problem with her weight in all the time he'd known her, and it wasn't like she'd paid much attention to what she ate. For her to be losing weight, there had to have been a significant change in her eating habits . . . and he didn't think he liked that idea. There wasn't all that much weight on her that she could lose and still be healthy/ "Are you . . . on a diet?" he asked tentatively.

She snorted. "No, and don't you start on me, too. Having one person hanging over my shoulder, trying to force-feed me, is more than enough - I don't need a second."

"Oh." He paused. "But you're . . . you're healthy, otherwise? You're doing ok, you're happy?"

She fell silent, trying to think of a way to answer that question. Healthy and doing ok? Sure she was. Happy? Well, not so much - but that was another one of those things he didn't need to know. "I'm . . . I'm fine, Bobby. What about you?"

He heard her hesitation and wondered what it was that she wasn't telling him. "I'm fine, too. I . . ." He stopped and swallowed nervously. "I miss you."

"Oh," she managed emotionlessly, even as her heart started pounding at his words. "Well, you know . . . you knowwhere you can find me. I have to go, Bobby," she added hastily, before he could ask what she meant by that. "It was nice talking to you."

She pulled the phone away from her ear and disconnected the call just as he started to reply. A few seconds later, the phone back on her belt and her face set in an expression of something resembling normalcy, she ran a slightly shaky hand through her hair and walked back into the squad room.


	6. Temperature spike

"Alex!"

Normally, she'd have been startled by the sudden appearance of her partner in front of her as she exited the conference room, but she was pretty sure her daily capacity for surprise had been entirely used up by the phone call she'd just received. So she just stopped walking, instead, and looked at Webster calmly. "What?"

"You need to ask?" he asked incredulously, grabbing her arm and pulling her back toward their desks. "What the hell _was_ that, Eames? You just looked at your phone, got an expression on your face like you saw a ghost, then ran and locked yourself in the conference room, and you have to ask me 'what'? Sit!" he commanded when they got to her desk, giving her a gentle push into her chair. "I want to know what just happened to you."

"I . . ." She shook her head and tried to pull her arm out of his grasp. "Nothing."

"Alexandra," he intoned, doing his best imitation of her father. "Don't you dare lie to me after that stunt!"

"Leave me alone." She finally resorted to glaring at him and prying his fingers off her arm. "Now."

"Not a chance." In spite of his words, though, he released her arm and returned to his own chair. "You scared the hell out of me, Alex. At least tell me everything's ok - no one you know is hurt or dead or anything?"

"Dead?" she said with a snort. "Hah. More like 'raised from the dead.'"

"Ok, at least you're answering me. That's progress. Now tell me who it is that's been raised from the dead."

"No."

"Yes."

"No."

"Y-"

"I'm sorry," said a loud voice from behind Webster's shoulder. "Did someone replace two of my detectives with five-year-olds when I wasn't looking?"

Both detectives closed their mouths and looked up at Deakins, who was giving them a look that demanded an explanation for their behavior. "Uh, sir . . ." Alex managed weakly.

"Just a minor personal disagreement," Webster said quickly. "Didn't mean you to overhear."

Looking unconvinced, Deakins raised an eyebrow. "I would have thought you're both at least thirty years past the stage of life where 'minor personal disagreements' are resolved by 'did too'-'did not'. In fact, I don't know that I've ever seen you two disagree out loud at all in the - what, a year? - that I've had you together."

"Yes, a year," Alex snapped a little too quickly.

Both men looked at her curiously. "Been counting?" Webster teased. "I didn't think I was _that_ bad."

"I . . ." Damn. She hadn't thought about how odd it would sound that she'd been keeping track of the time. Fighting the blush that wanted to rise on her cheeks, she shook her head. "Uh, I meant that it's been about that, yeah."

Neither man looked dissuaded. "Miss him, huh?" Deakins said with a sympathetic smile. "He'll be back, Eames, you know that. It's temporary."

Wanting to kick herself, Alex just pressed her lips together and shrugged.

"Is that what this is about?" Webster said with dawning understanding. When Deakins shot him an interested look, though, he decided that discretion was the better part of valor and cut himself off before he could go any farther in that vein. "Never mind, Cap. She's just a little . . . moody lately, you know?" he said in a smug tone designed to imply that he thought his partner was PMSing.

"Moody, eh?" Deakins replied, looking thoughtfully from Webster to Eames. After a second, apparently having decided to accept that explanation, he sighed. "Play nice, Eames. Don't make me go buy some Midol for you."

She glared at him but said nothing, preferring to have him think her moody instead of continue to wonder about her attitude.

"You can say 'thank you' now," Webster said mildly when Deakins was gone.

"Don't expect me to thank you for diffusing a problem _you _started," she growled, refusing to look at him.

"Hey," he shot back, "I'm not the one who just had an . . . an _episode _of some kind in the middle of the squad room when my phone rang."

"Shut up."

"Talk to me, Eames. I just saved your ass from Deakins's questions; I think you owe me an explanation. Especially now that you just let it slip that you've been keeping track of how long your old partner's been gone. Was that him on the phone?"

"I . . ." She shook her head. "Don't, please."

"Was that him on the phone?" Webster repeated insistently. "It was, wasn't it."

"Fine, ok. It was him," she sighed. "There. Are you happy?"

"No," he said flatly. "You need to tell me what the hell's going on."

"Nothing. Nothing's going on. I just hadn't talked to him for a while, that's all."

"Nope, I don't think so." Leaning forward and pinning her with his gaze, he shook his head pointedly. "You don't almost pass out just because someone you haven't talked to in a while calls you up. How . . ." He paused, glancing around to make sure no one was eavesdropping, then lowered his voice. "Exactly how close _were _you to this guy?"

"I'm not listening to this." Glaring at Webster, she pushed her chair back and got to her feet. "If all you're going to do is pry, then I'm going home."

"Alex . . ."

"I'll see you tomorrow," she said tightly, then turned and fled.

* * *

"He called," Alex said, not bothering with a greeting, when her sister answered the phone that night.

"He . . . what? Who?" Maggie said blankly. "Wait a minute - you mean _he _called? After all this time?"

"A year on the nose," Alex affirmed. "And right in the middle of the work day."

"Oh, no!" The sound of Maggie pulling out a chair at her kitchen table and dropping heavily into it came through the phone line. "What did he say? What did you do?"

Sighing, Alex switched the phone to her other ear. "I freaked out and scared the hell out of my partner - he thinks I had some sort of breakdown, I think - but when I actually answered the phone, I think I managed to come off as normal."

"How normal?"

"Well, I didn't cry, for one thing." And that _was _something to be proud of, she reminded herself as she opened her refrigerator and fished out a bottle of beer. "I asked him how he was . . . how his mother was . . . you know, the usual polite stuff."

"And that's it? What did he say? Does he miss you?" Maggie demanded. "Did he beg your forgiveness and swear that he'd never do anything stupid ever again if you agreed to take him back? And then did you flat-out laugh at him?"

Alex snorted. "Not quite. The closest he came to that was 'I miss you.'"

"And you said . . .?" her sister prompted.

"I said, uh . . ." She sighed, remembering. "I told him that he knows where he can find me. And then . . . I hung up."

"That's good," Maggie said with firm reassurance. "That's what we decided you should do, remember?"

"Yeah, I know. It just . . . didn't feel as good as I hoped it would. But at the same time, I'm glad you made me think about it, because if I hadn't known that he might call . . . I think I would have totally lost it."

"Well, good, then. You did _good_, Alex! Be happy."

Alex just sighed again. "My partner started asking questions afterward, though. And then my captain showed up and pointed out that it had been a year, which Webster didn't know, and now he does know, and he's entirely too not-dumb to not put the pieces together . . ."

"So what?" Maggie interrupted. "No one is going to take in the fact that you were unsettled by Bobby calling and come up with 'Eames was madly in love with her partner and then he deserted her after treating her like crap' as an explanation - I promise you, that's not going to be Webster's first inclination, or anyone else's."

"Yeah, I guess. I . . ." She took a gulp of her beer. "He sounded kind of like he wanted to say something more than what he actually said."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Maybe to apologize or something."

"And what would you have said if he _did _apologize?"

"Oh, I don't _know_," Alex groaned. "Probably hung up on him because I didn't know what to say. Which I did anyway, really."

"Al?" Maggie said cautiously. "What is it that you want from him now? Would you want him to come back? Would you take him back, if he did move back out here? Or are you over him?"

"Christ," she muttered, "I don't know what I want! I'd say that I'd take him back - I mean, as pathetic as it is, I do still care about him - except that I know things would just get harder from there, if he did come back. There's not going to be a happily-ever-after, no matter what he does or I do."

"Hmm."

"Mags?"

"What?"

"Do you think he'll call me again?" Even she could hear the note of hopefulness in her voice, and she wanted to kick herself for it.

"Yeah," Maggie sighed. "Yeah, I think he will. If you thought it sounded like he had more to say . . . then he probably did. Will you talk to him if he calls back?"

She contemplated her half-empty bottle for a few seconds. "I don't think I'm capable of _not _talking to him if I get the chance. How's that for pathetic?"

"You need closure, hon. You were in love with him. It's only human to want some kind of resolution, no matter what that resolution ends up being."

"The problem," Alex said quietly, "is that even now, I don't think it's a matter of how I 'was' in love with him . . . it's a matter of how I think I still am."

"Maybe you are. But I'll tell you this - if _he's _not still in love with _you . . . _then he's too stupid to deserve you anyway."

Alex just closed her eyes and downed the rest of her beer.


	7. Foreign bodies

_The next day . . ._

It was noon and Alex was focused on her computer screen, trying to pretend she didn't know Webster was watching her, when the phone on his desk rang. As he diverted his attention to answer it, she breathed a sigh of relief and let herself relax slightly.

That feeling of relaxation lasted all of ten seconds, until Webster, the phone still to his ear, looked up at her and said to whoever was on the other end of the line, "Why . . . yes, there is. Why do you ask?" A short pause as he listened, then: "I believe so, yes. Would you like to speak to her?" A second later, he covered the mouthpiece of the phone with one hand and said her name.

"What?" she muttered, trying to sound disinterested.

"Some guy named Riley, wants to talk to you."

She blinked. "Riley who?"

Webster shrugged. "I don't know. I think that's his last name. You going to pick up or not?"

"Yeah, fine." She waited for him to transfer the call to her extension, then picked up. "Eames."

"Alexandra Eames?" asked a male voice she didn't recognize.

"Uh, yeah. Can I help you, sir?"

The man cleared his throat. "Yeah. Uh, I'm Detective John Riley, with the LAPD. You know a Bobby Goren?"

All the air left her lungs in a rush. There was no reason for anyone Goren worked with to call her, unless . . .

Swallowing, she managed to croak out, "Yes. Is he . . . what's wrong?"

"Oh, hey, whoa," he blurted, seeming to have just realized what she might infer from his call. "Didn't mean to scare you. He's just fine. I'm, uh . . . I'm his partner."

Webster was watching her again. Without looking up from the phone, she gave him the finger. "Oh. Yes, I know him. Now . . . if he's ok, then why's his partner calling me?"

"You're Alexandra?" Riley asked again.

Alex sighed. "Didn't we already go over this? Yes, I'm Alex; now tell me why you're calling me."

Riley laughed. "Man, you're a cracker, aren't you? You and him must have been a hell of a couple."

"I beg your pardon?" she asked sharply, purposely not looking up when she felt Webster look at her with renewed interest at her tone. "What are you talking about?"

"You and Goren," Riley said matter-of-factly. "You dated, right? Or he at least had a crush on you?"

"_Why _are you calling me?" she repeated through gritted teeth.

"You know he's got a picture of you? In that binder thing he carries?"

Alex chose to be silent rather than repeat herself yet again.

"He looks at it when he thinks no one's paying attention."

He still thought about her that much? She fought the surge of warmth that thought sent through her. "Detective Riley, my time is valuable. If you have something to say to me, please just say it."

The was surprised silence on the other end of the line for a moment. "Uh, ok," Riley finally said. "I want to know why you two aren't in contact anymore."

"Why don't you try asking your partner that?"

"Because he won't talk about you. He walked out yesterday when I asked too many questions."

She snorted. "I don't blame him. I'd walk out on you too, if you were here to walk out on."

Riley sighed. "Ok, look Alexandra - Detective Eames - whatever . . . I just thought you should know that from what I can see, he's dying to hear from you. He's a nice guy, but he's . . . isolated. I tried to set him up with my sister, and he just told me to tell her he's gay, because he didn't want to deal with it. The only person - man or woman - besides his mother I've ever heard him mention is you, and . . . I just think maybe you should bury the hatchet. At least talk to the guy."

"Thank you for your advice, Detective," she replied coldly. "I'll take it into consideration. Now, is there anything else I can do for you?"

"Uh, no. Nope, that was it." Riley paused to clear his throat. "Thanks for listening, ma'am."

"Yeah, sure. Have a good afternoon." She moved to slam down the phone, then checked her movement at the last second and set it gently back in the cradle.

"What -" began Webster.

"Don't. Ask."

* * *

Riley hung up the phone on his desk and leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes and wondering what the hell had possessed him to make the call he'd just made. Goren wouldn't thank him for calling the woman, no matter how much he might be dying to hear from her, and the firebrand that was Alexandra Eames hadn't sounded too pleased about it, either.

"Riley, it's only one. It's way too early to be falling asleep on the job."

Riley cracked one eye and found his partner looking down at him with amusement. "Sorry, chief. Long hour with you gone, what with playing mailman and all."

"Another card?" Goren asked absently as he settled into his chair.

"Yep." Riley pulled out the card that had precipitated his irrational phone call-making in the past hour, and turned it over in his hand, pretending to examine the envelope. "You know, from all these cute cards she sends, you'd never know she has quite a mouth on her."

There was complete silence for a few seconds, then Bobby said in a dangerously soft voice, "Excuse me?"

"Your Alexandra, here . . ." He flipped the card across their desks toward the other man. "An impressive woman."

"And how would you know that, exactly?" Goren asked, figuring that his partner was just trying to get his goat again, as he concentrated his attention on slitting open the envelope.

"Thought she was going to come through the phone and throttle me," Riley said conversationally. "How was I supposed to know she was such a pessimist?"

The card, which he hadn't even unfolded yet, was set down on Bobby's desk with a gentleness that only barely concealed the surge of anger he felt. "The phone, Riley? What the hell did you do while I was gone?"

"Research." He showed Bobby a printed-out webpage. "A woman you were close with, from New York . . . like I keep telling you, I'm not as stupid as you think. All I had to do was search the NYPD website to find her contact information."

Almost unable to believe that Riley would have gone so far as to actually contact Eames, Goren could only stare at him for a second. "You . . . you _hunted down _my partner? Just because you were _curious_?"

"Curious . . . among other things," Riley agreed. "Let me tell you, I think she almost had a heart attack before I managed to get out that you weren't hurt or anything. And hey, I thought I was your partner," he added, pretending to sulk.

Momentarily diverted from his anger by Riley's comment, Bobby blinked. "She was worried about me?"

"Well, yeah. I didn't really think about how I was going to introduce myself, so I just asked her if she knew you and said that I was your partner . . . I think she assumed that the only reason I'd be calling her would be to . . . you know, give her bad news."

The pencil in Bobby's hand snapped in half, but his face remained composed as he said, "And why, exactly, _did _you call her, when you know that you had absolutely no business doing it?"

"Hey, man . . ." Riley said cautiously, watching his partner's face. "I worry about you. That thing about my sister . . . that was the last straw. I decided that I was sick of seeing you moon over this Alex woman, so I called her and told her so."

The two pencil halves hit the desk, along with the flat of Bobby's hand. "You told her that I was 'mooning' over her? So help me, Riley, you'd better tell me within the next five seconds that this was a joke, or you're going to wish you never met me."

Riley coughed and tugged at his collar. "Listen, Goren, it was just a short call . . . I just wanted to let her know you miss her, you know? It's not like I told her any big secrets - not that I _know _any of your big secrets in the first place. I told her that I thought she ought to forgive you for whatever it is you fought over and she pretty much hung up on me - that's all that happened."

"She hung up on you?"

"Well, she thanked me for my advice - sarcastically - and told me to have a good afternoon before she did it, but yeah."

In spite of his anger, Bobby found a smile trying to creep across his lips at the thought of Alex giving Riley a dressing-down that didn't require words. "You told her she should forgive me and she told you to have a good afternoon and goodbye?" he summarized. "That's all?"

"Uh, yeah, pretty much." And then there was the part where he'd told her about the photo Bobby carried around . . . but he wasn't about to admit to spilling the beans on that one.

"You called Alex," Bobby said slowly. "At work. In the middle of the day. To tell her that you thought she should start speaking to me again? In what _possible _universe could that have seemed like a good idea to you?"

Riley shrugged. "Hey, I'm Irish. We're known for our impulsiveness, not our our clear thought processes."

"As you keep reminding me, Riley, you're not as stupid as you look. You'd better swear to me, right here and now, that what you just told me is all you told _her_."

"Or what?" Riley challenged, genuinely curious about whether he'd found something that would actually inspire the usually-impassive Bobby Goren to violence.

Goren shook his head. "Or I might just give Alex your address and sic _her_ on you. Not only does she have 'a mouth on her,'" he mimicked with a cool smile, "but she's a hell of a good shot, with her gun and with her knee."

Riley just smirked and leaned back in his chair again. "Sounds like you're pretty proud of her. And that _is_ basically all I told her, but . . . come to think of it, if it meant the two of you getting together, I might just accept the beating from her, you know that? Always more fun to get socked by a pretty girl than another man, no matter what."

"Shut up," Bobby snapped. "You talked yourself out of bodily harm on this one, but you're on thin ice."

"Hey, thanks, partner," Riley said with a grin. "I'll be sure to get my ice skates sharpened."


	8. Surgical intervention

A/N: Yeah, so if you hadn't noticed, I haven't been doing much writing lately. I have a huge-ass pile of homework due Monday, and I've been trying to get working on it so that come Sunday night I don't find myself tempted to run away to Timbuktu. Therefore, fic's been set on the back burner for the moment. This is probably the only update (of this story or of White Hat) you'll see from me before next Wednesday-ish. Sorry! Believe me, I'd rather be ficcing than programming finite state transducers!

* * *

Bobby and his mother had barely exchanged hellos that evening before she gave him a hard look and said, "Something's wrong."

She was using that tone of voice - the one he'd come to recognize as the tone that immediately preceded either an attempt at meddling or the asking of a question he wouldn't want to answer. That tone could mean nothing good for his state of mind, he thought with a sigh. "What?" he replied as he lowered himself into the chair in the corner of her room.

"Did something happen to you today? You look . . . shell-shocked."

"I . . . uh . . ." He'd forgotten over the years how perceptive his mother could be, and for a second, he almost wished that she weren't _quite _as lucid as she was at the moment. "No, nothing happened. I'm fine, Mom."

Frances closed the book she'd been reading with a snap and set it down next to her on the bed. "Don't lie to your mother, Robert. It's written all over your face that something shook you up, so you may as well tell me what it was."

"Nothing shook me up," he insisted, not quite meeting her eyes. "I'm just . . . tired."

He could deny it all he wanted, but she was going to get to the bottom of this. "You talked to someone from home," she guessed. "Lewis? Is he ok?"

He blinked. "Lewis is just fine, or at least he was the last time I checked."

"Ok, not Lewis," Frances mused. "Someone else, then. Your partner? The one who you're 'not on good terms' with, maybe?"

"Mom -"

His face had tightened - just a little - in response to her question, and that told her, almost better than words could have, that she'd scored a direct hit. "Her name is Alex, right? I still . . . names aren't the easiest things to remember, you know. But it _is _Alex? I remembered this one right?"

"Her name is Alex, yes." And with that he shut his mouth, resolving to not let his mother squeeze any more information out of him.

"I take it the conversation didn't go well, then, if you're so unwilling to talk about it," she sighed. "I wish you would tell me what it is that stopped the two of you speaking to each other in the first place."

"I told you, Mom we're not 'not speaking' . . . it's just that we don't have anything in common anymore. Would you please just leave it alone?"

With a shrug, she looked down at her book, tracing the lettering on the cover. "I missed most of the past thirty-five years of your life, Bobby. I'd prefer not to miss any more of it."

That shot hit him right between the eyes, as he was sure she'd known it would. "I'm sorry," he said quietly. "It's not anything important, ok? I promise."

Frances snorted derisively. "Look at you, sitting there and lying through your teeth. Making a 'promise.' I would have thought you're too honest a person to do that sort of thing."

"I . . ." He sighed, tacitly admitting defeat. "Alex and I had an argument over my coming out here with you, and we still haven't resolved it." As hedging the truth went, he thought it was pretty good. After all, the argument - well, arguments - _had _ostensibly been about his moving. That they had also been about his boorish behavior toward Alex, his mother didn't need to know.

She studied his face, searching for evidence of deception. "What was it exactly that you fought about? She didn't want you to go?"

He thought about that. She'd never asked him not to go - in fact, she'd wished his mother well and told him to "enjoy California" . . . so why had it made him feel so rotten when he actually went?

"Bobby."

"Huh?" he asked, returning his attention to Frances.

"I'm not telepathic, even if you are," she told him teasingly. "You're going to have to actually speak your answer."

He ran a hand through his hair nervously. "I, uh . . . didn't actually tell her about it until a week before we went. She was . . . annoyed."

Frances raised her eyebrows. "You only gave her a week's notice? I would have been 'annoyed' too, if you'd pulled the rug out from under me like that!"

"Leave it alone, Mom. You don't need to be concerned with Alex."

"Of course I do, if she's got my son so wound up," she said. "You can't stop me from worrying."

Bobby groaned. "I'm not trying to stop you from worrying - although that would be nice," he added quickly. "You can worry all you have to; just . . . leave this topic alone."

She returned her attention to her book, this time flipping it open to the page she'd been reading before he came in and running a finger down the center of the spine as she said quietly, "She wasn't just your partner."

He let that statement hang in the air for a full minute before sighing and moving to sit next to her on the bed. "No, she wasn't."

"You love her."

He swallowed. "Yes."

Without warning, Frances jumped to her feet and aimed an accusing finger at her son's face. "Then what are you doing here with _me_, instead of there with _her_?"

Bobby flinched away from her hand, his eyes widening. "What?"

"You heard me! I want to know why you're in California with me, instead of in New York with the woman you just admitted you love!"

"Mom, calm down," he attempted, covering her hand with his and forcing it back down to her side as he stood up. "I wasn't going to send you out here on your own, and -"

"And what?" she challenged, moving to stand nearly nose-to-nose with him. "I'm your _mother_, Bobby. I'm old news; I know you love me whether you're here or there. _I _am not the one who needs reassurance that you care. She . . . well, I imagine your Alex did. Or does. So now I'm asking you - why did you choose to move yourself out here, with your mother, rather than stay there with the girl you love?"

"Mom," he said resignedly, "you couldn't travel here alone, and -"

"But once I was out here, you didn't need to stay!" she exclaimed. "I enjoy having you here, Bobby, you know that, but . . . the truth is, I'm stable enough to ride out the rest of my time here on my own."

"Well . . . well . . . I just think that you don't deserve to be stuck here alone if you don't have to be," Bobby replied defensively. "You've been forced to spend too much of your life alone as it is."

"Sweetheart . . . I'm _not _alone." She took a step toward the door of her room and gestured to the hallway it opened onto. "There are a hundred other people in this study, and I see them every day. We have group therapy. We eat meals together. I don't . . ." She paused, trying to think of a way to phrase her next statement that wouldn't sound hurtful. "I don't need or want you to give up your life so that I can have mine."

Exhaling slowly in an attempt to regain his self-control, Bobby turned away from her. "I'm _not_ giving up my life. I have a job; I don't spend _all _my time here. And whether I'm giving anything up or not, I don't mind doing this!"

"Why not?"

He looked at her in confusion. "'Why not' what?"

"You had to abandon someone you love to come out here with me. Why doesn't that seem to bother you? Why aren't you resentful of it?"

"Mom, I love you, and -"

"Didn't you just tell me you love her, too?" she interrupted. "So why did you opt to hide out here with me instead of stay with her? There's something going on here that you're not telling me."

Bobby closed his eyes and sighed, realizing that she wasn't going to let the topic go until he gave her an answer. "I can't resent something I did to myself," he finally said quietly. "I burned my bridges with her. I couldn't have stayed there anyway."

"How did you burn your bridges?" Frances said sharply, sound very much like a mother demanding to know how her freshly painted kitchen wall had gotten covered in crayon marks. "What did you do?"

"Mom . . ."

She waved a hand, dismissing his protest. "You've told me this much of it. You may as well finish the story."

With a groan, Bobby dropped his arms back to his sides and began pacing the room. "The truth is, we didn't argue just about me moving. I . . . I didn't treat her well, even before the move became an issue between us."

She looked at him blankly. "What are you talking about? You're always nice to your girlfriends. Half the time you let them walk all over you because you're _too_ nice."

He halted his pacing long enough to shake his head in disgust at himself. She was right; Alex was probably the only woman he'd ever dated who had cause to complain about his treatment of her. "I . . ." He shook his head again and sighed. "I was preoccupied with what I was going to do about getting you out here. I . . . didn't give her much attention."

"How much is 'not much'?" Frances asked suspiciously.

"I'm not going into that, Mom. Just suffice it to say that she was right to be angry with me."

"Hmm," she murmured noncommittally. "So you figured the answer was to just give up on her and run away from the problem? You're smarter than that, Robert Goren. Did you apologize to her?"

"I . . . I tried. I don't think she believed me."

"Why not?"

He cleared his throat nervously. "She threw me out of her apartment a few minutes later. Like I said," he went on before his mother could say anything, "I burned my bridges, whether I meant to or not. She didn't want me around."

Frances crossed her arms, then leaned one of her shoulders against the wall next to her bed. "If you really didn't treat her well, then it shouldn't surprise you that one little apology didn't cut it. Have you tried again, or have you just been hiding behind me? Have you talked to her since we've been out here?"

"I . . . no," he admitted reluctantly. "She doesn't want to talk to me."

"You apologized to her when she was angry. It didn't occur to you that after she'd had time to cool off, she might handle things differently?"

"Damn it, Mom, I don't need to listen to this!" he blurted, whirling around to glare at her. "I've already got my partner riding me about her, and -"

"Oh, really?" she broke in, arching one eyebrow. "What does he have to say about this?"

"That I should apologize again," he muttered sullenly. "It's not like he's an expert at this, though."

Frances just gave him a slight smile. "You're outnumbered two-to-one on this, Bobby. Why don't you, just this once, try listening to what other people think you should do?"

"Mom . . ."

She glanced down at her watch, then looked back up at him. "I have a group session in ten minutes, honey. You should get going."

Bobby blinked, caught by surprise at the sudden dismissal. "Uh, ok. Look, Mom," he said gently, leaning down to kiss her cheek, "don't keep worrying about this, ok? It's not important, and you don't need any unnecessary stress."

Rolling her eyes, Frances patted his cheek lovingly. "Ok, dear. I won't worry about it."

"Thank you. I'll see you in the morning, ok?"

"Of course." She gave him another smile and waited patiently as he made his way out of the room and down the hallway, but when he was out of earshot, she shook her head in amusement and allowed her smile to widen into a grin. "Of course I won't worry," she murmured to his retreating back. "I'll be too busy _doing_ something about it."


	9. Opportunistic infection

A week later, Goren and Riley had just settled down in the squad room to eat lunch when Goren's desk phone rang. Groaning through the one bite of his lunch he'd managed to take before this disruption, he reluctantly lowered his sandwich away from his mouth and put it down, then reached for the phone.

"Yeah, Goren," he mumbled into the phone, tucking it between his ear and his shoulder and picking up his sandwich again.

"Did you put her up to this?" a female voice barked.

He knew that voice, he realized after taking a few seconds to mentally strip away the fury it held. It was . . .

He dropped the sandwich, then scrambled to pick it up again before it fell apart all over his blotter. "Uh . . . Alex? Is that you?"

"You know damn well it's me, and don't you dare try to not answer my question!"

The sandwich was deposited firmly in the corner of his desk as he focused his attention on the phone and the raised voice coming through it. "I don't . . . what question? What are you talking about?"

"Oh, that's rich," Alex sneered. "Of course you don't know; I'm sure your mother just took it upon herself to try to make me feel sorry for you. Maybe she's just that bored in the hospital, huh?"

"My _mother_?" he echoed, surprise making his voice louder than normal. "What does my mother have to do with anything?"

Across from him, Riley's head had jerked up a few seconds ago at the mention of Alex, and now his look of interest sharpened at the mention of Bobby's mother. Bobby gave him a death glare and threw a handy pen at his partner's head.

"That's what _I'm _asking _you_!" Alex snapped. "Why am I getting mail from your mother where she talks about you? First your partner, and now your mother? Jesus, Bobby, if you have something to say, you can say it yourself or not at all."

"Wait, wait, wait," he said, making a 'stop' gesture with his hand, as if she could see it. "First of all, I didn't ask Riley to say anything to you. He did that on his own, and I nearly killed him when he told me about it. Second of all, what would my mother possibly be sending you? Are you sure it's not mail from you to her that got bounced back for insufficient postage or something?"

Alex snorted. "Somehow, I doubt that anything that starts, 'My Dear Alex,' is something I wrote. It's from your mom, Bobby. So now why don't you tell me _why _she's sending me anything at all, let alone this . . . note thing."

"'Note thing'? Back up for a second," he said, trying not to let her hear the panic he was feeling. "What, exactly, did she send you?"

"Oh, because I'm sure you don't already know," she scoffed.

"Alex, please. Just . . . just humor me, ok?"

"Fine." She sighed. "If you want to pretend you don't know what I'm talking about, go right ahead. She sent me a letter. Would you like me to read it so you can pretend you haven't heard about _it _before, either?"

"I . . ."

"_My Dear Alex_," she went on, reading in a mockingly sweet voice, without giving him time to finish his response. "_I know we've met before, but only briefly, so I apologize for this sudden communication. I wouldn't have been so forward in most circumstances, but I feel that something needs to be done about the situation you and my son are in. Bobby refuses to admit it, but I can tell that he's very unhappy, and I suspect that that's because he no longer has you in his life. He seems to believe that you hate him, and I hope he's wrong, because no matter what you feel for him, he still loves -"_

_"_Stop." The sharpness of his command startled even him, but he just couldn't stand the humiliation anymore. "Stop reading, please. I didn't tell her to send you that, Alex. I swear."

There was a long second of silence before she asked quietly, "You didn't?"

"No." Riley was still watching him, but for once, Bobby didn't care. He had bigger concerns at the moment. "I told her that we . . . uh, what happened between me and you . . . I told her it wasn't her business."

"Well," Alex said tartly, "it looks like you didn't do a very good job convincing her of that, huh?"

Bobby sighed. "I guess not. I'm sorry, Eames. I'll, uh . . . I'll talk to her. It won't happen again."

"Hmm." There was thoughtful silence for a moment on her end of the line. "She's wrong, you know."

"Wrong? About what?"

"Or you're wrong, I guess. It depends where she got the idea."

Bobby slumped over his desk and propped his head up with one hand. "What 'idea'? I'm not following."

Alex muttered something to herself, then sighed and said in a normal voice, "I don't hate you. So whichever of you came up with that idea . . . you were wrong."

Well, that hadn't been something he expected to hear out of her mouth. All he could manage in response was a hesitant, "Oh."

"Your mom's letter says that that's what _you _think, Bobby," she said softly. "Is she right?"

"I . . . don't really know what to think. It's been, uh . . . a long time."

"A long time," she echoed almost wistfully. "Yeah, it has."

She hadn't hung up on him yet. That was a vast improvement from the last time they'd spoken. Deciding to take a chance, Bobby cleared his throat nervously and said, "So, uh . . . uh, how have you been, Alex?"

"Mmm." He could hear her chair squeak as she leaned back in it and adjusted her weight before replying, "I'm getting by. Webster still thinks I'm too skinny. Deakins bitches about the Chief of Ds. Work's not too bad, in general."

Not only hadn't she hung up on him, but she had also actually answered his question - something she'd avoided last time. He wondered exactly what it was that his mother had written, to bring about such a change in her attitude. "What about things other than work? Your friends? A . . . uh, boyfriend?"

Alex drew in a breath and held it, amazed that he'd asked the forbidden question. "I . . . my friends are good. Janet's pregnant again and still craving the weirdest foods you can think of," she said when she had regained control of herself. "No big changes." She hesitated, then added quickly, "No boyfriend."

"Oh. That's . . . nice. About Janet, I mean." He started to clear his throat again, but broke it off to bat away a paper clip that Riley had just chucked at him. "Stop it," he growled at his partner.

"Stop what?" Alex asked, sounding confused. "I didn't say anything."

"Not you." He glared hard at Riley. "My partner. He has . . . self-control issues."

"You mean the partner that thought it was a good idea to call and lecture me? That partner?"

He made a mental note to rescind the pardon he'd given Riley. "Yes, that one."

"Let me talk to him."

"I beg your pardon?" he asked, unable to believe she'd said what he thought he'd heard.

"Give him the phone, Bobby. It's not that difficult."

With a shrug, both mental and physical, he acquiesced and held the phone out to his partner. No skin off his back if she wanted to chew out Riley. "She wants to talk to you."

Riley blinked. "Me?"

"You." He shoved the phone toward him again, then sat back to listen as Riley took it.

"Hello?" Riley paused to listen. "Um, yeah," he said slowly a second later. "I guess so. But I - oh." He stopped again, eyes widening slightly. "He's . . ." A longer pause this time, and a smirk appeared on his face. "Hell no. I told you about my sister, remember? He's not even close." He glanced up at Bobby, still looking smug, and said into the phone "Does that mean you're -" He stopped, swallowing. "Ok, ok. Sorry I asked." He listened again for a few seconds, then smiled. "Ok. You should call him more often, you know that?"

Her voice could be heard all the way across to Bobby's desk when she responded to that, and Riley winced and pulled the phone away from his ear, holding it out to Bobby. "Here, take it. She's all yours."

Bobby accepted the phone. "What did you say to him?"

"Not much," she said airily. "I asked him if he was happy now that I called you. Look, Bobby, I have to go. We've got a witness to talk to, and I think Webster's going to take off without me if I don't get moving. I, uh . . . you take care of yourself, ok? And say hi to your mom for me."

Once again, she'd disconnected the call before he even had a chance to say goodbye, he thought with a sigh as he put down the phone on his end. But he didn't think she'd done it because she was angry or uncomfortable this time. It had just sounded like a matter of expedience.

"What'd she have to say to you?" Riley asked, breaking into Bobby's thoughts.

"She . . ." He thought about what to tell his partner. "My mother wrote to her, and she thought I'd asked her to. She was a little annoyed."

Riley snickered. "I could hear her yelling at you from over here. I take it you got her calmed down?"

Bobby just shook his head in answer to that. "With her, I'm never sure. I think I convinced her I didn't have anything to do with it."

"Well, good," Riley said with a grin. "Give it a few more weeks, and you guys'll be thick as thieves again. You better invite me to the wedding."

Forcing himself not to react to that, Bobby shrugged. "It's been a long time for Alex and me, John. I'm not going to assume anything."

"Hey, that's fine." Riley returned his eyes to his computer screen, then seemed to think of something else. "Because you know," he tacked on, glancing back up at Bobby and smirking, "I can make more than enough assumptions for both of us."


	10. Relapse

A/N: Yay, transducers programmed! And thus I reward myself with some wonderful angsty fic!

* * *

Maggie called in reinforcements that night, in the form of their older sister Laurie.

Laurie was hardly in the door of Alex's apartment before Maggie yanked the letter out of Alex's hands and handed it to her. "Here. Read this."

Laurie accepted the sheet of paper before she even realized what it was she was taking. "A letter?" she asked a second later, studying it. "Who still opens their letters with 'My Dear' anymore, anyway?"

"Her ex's mom, apparently," Maggie replied with a shrug, pointing to Alex.

"His _mom_?" Laurie echoed disbelievingly. "Why is his _mom _writing to you?"

"Guilt trip," Alex muttered from her seat on the couch, not looking up from her hands.

"An attempt at garnering the sympathy vote," Maggie corrected, giving Alex a quelling look. "Read it, Laur. You'll see what I mean."

Laurie eyed the letter for a few more seconds, then shrugged, cleared her throat, and began to read aloud:

" '_My Dear Alex,_

_I know we've met before, but only briefly, so I apologize for this sudden communication. I wouldn't have been so forward in most circumstances, but I feel that something needs to be done about the situation you and my son are in. Bobby refuses to admit it, but I can tell that he's very unhappy, and I suspect that that's because he no longer has you in his life. He seems to believe that you hate him, and I hope he's wrong, because no matter what you feel for him, he still loves you._

_'He won't share with me exactly what happened between you, but he has told me that he believes he mistreated you. I tend to think he's simply being too hard on himself, because I've never in my life seen him mistreat a woman - but then, I'm his mother, so I may be just a bit biased._

_'From my perspective, both as his mother and as someone who is an uninformed observer to the relationship between him and you, it seems as though he considers the act of having hurt you an unforgivable offense - one that he has punished with a self-imposed exile for the past year. His reasoning for this, or at least what part of it I've been able to get out of him, is that you no longer wish to speak to him (and, presumably, to work with him) because of his behavior; however, as I'm sure you know, my son has a tendency to take the weight of the world on his shoulders, whether it's actually his responsibility or not._

_'Having said all that, let me now tell you a little about his life out here in California:_

_'He lives in a small apartment in the city. Although I'm unable to visit it, I suspect it's substantially less homey than my room here at the hospital, which he has decorated with everything from real sheets on the bed to family photographs on the nightstand._

_'He stops in to visit with me on the way to work in the morning, then again on his lunch break, and yet again on his way home from work. More than once, he's stayed long past visiting hours at night, with a special dispensation from the charge nurses, who all say they wish he were their son. I've asked him whether he ever does anything else in his free time, but his answer is always the same: he's not interested in trying to meet people or have fun. I believe his exact words once were, "We're here so you can get treatment, Mom, not so I can make friends."_

_'I'm sure you're aware of how much of a loner Bobby is under the best of circumstances, so I ask you to imagine now a Bobby even more withdrawn than that._

_'Worrisome, isn't it?_

_'Well, whether it's worrisome or not, I'm sure you're wondering why I felt that I needed to go so far as to contact you about it. The answer to that question is this: Bobby won't now, and will never, allow himself to tell you these things. He won't tell you how much he misses you or how much abuse he's been heaping upon himself for handling his departure so badly. He won't tell you that he's staying here, on the other side of the country, even though I don't need him to be here, because he believes that he would only make your life worse by returning to New York._

_'He certainly won't tell you that he still loves you, but Alex . . . he's told _me_ that he does._

_'I'm not asking that you try to renew whatever special relationship you and he had in the past - I wouldn't presume, given how little I know about it - but I would like, very much, if you might at least speak to him and try to convince him to live his life, whether it includes you or not._

_'Thank you for taking the time to read this letter, Alex. I hope you and yours are all well, and that you remain that way._

_'Regards,_

_'Frances Goren'"_

Laurie's voice trailed off as she finished reading the letter, and she handed it back to Alex. "Wow. Is she . . . is this stuff true?"

Alex grunted and slumped back against the couch. "I guess. Maybe. Who the hell knows?"

Her sisters exchanged a look. "Um, Alex?" Laurie finally said tentatively. "If the stuff in this letter is right, shouldn't you be, oh, I don't know . . . _happy_?"

"Yeah," Maggie agreed with a slow nod. "You've been telling me for a year how you feel pathetic because you still love him. So here you go - you can both be pathetic together, and live happily ever after in your own little kingdom of patheticness. We'll all wear black to the wedding and -"

"Maggie," Laurie broke in loudly. "Your sense of humor is _not _helping."

"Well, excuse me for trying to do something to make the poor girl actually smile once in a while!"

"Don't call me a 'poor girl,'" Alex spoke up from her seat. "Even if I don't talk, I'm hearing every word you two are saying."

Laurie sighed and dropped onto the couch next to her sister. "Alex, what's the problem here? If Maggie's right that you still love him, and now we've found out that he apparently still loves you . . ."

"Because!" Alex exploded, throwing her hands up in exasperation and jumping to her feet. "Because I loved him last time, too, and that didn't save anything. I'm sure he loved me, at least for a while, last time, too, and _that _didn't save anything. What the hell do you expect me to do, just forget about everything that he did to me and hope it won't happen again?"

Maggie and Laurie watched her in silence for a few more seconds, waiting to see if she had anything else to add to her rant. When Alex just fell silent and, running an annoyed hand through her hair, began to pace, Maggie ventured cautiously, "But if she's right that he hates himself for it . . . don't you think it's possible he's learned his lesson?" She paused there, but when Alex opened her mouth to speak, she rushed on. "Hold on. Listen to me, ok? You and I have been dissecting this for a year, Alex, and you know I'd like nothing better than to see him take a long walk off a short pier . . . into a tank full of piranhas that haven't been fed for a month . . . but if this thing from his mother is right . . . maybe you should think about it. It doesn't read like a mother who's just saying whatever she has to to make people think her kid is perfect."

Alex didn't reply immediately, instead shaking her head and turning to walk away. "You don't understand the way he is," she finally called to them as she disappeared into the kitchen. "I'm sure he does hate himself right now, and I'm sure he would never consciously do it again, but you're missing the huge part of the story where he didn't do it consciously the _first_ time, either!"

"So . . . what are you going to do, then?" asked Laurie. "Are you at least going to do what his mom asked you to, and tell him to stop hating himself?"

"He knows what I think," she said with a sigh. "I already called him today, when I opened the letter, to bitch him out because I thought he put her up to sending it."

"And he didn't?" Laurie said, cautiously following Alex's path to the kitchen. "What did he say?" she asked gently, putting an arm around Alex's shoulders and attempting to lead her back to the living room. "Come on, sit down again and talk to us."

Alex sighed and allowed herself to be steered back to the couch. "He said that he'd told her to stay out of it and he didn't have any idea she'd sent me anything. I could tell he was embarrassed."

"What else?" Maggie prompted, putting her arm around Alex from the other direction as Laurie pulled her down onto the couch between the two of them. Leaning her head against her sister's, she clarified, "You said he already knows what you think. So . . . what did you tell him?"

"That I don't hate him," she said with her best attempt at a careless shrug. "We . . . talked for a couple minutes. Just about, you know, stuff. Then I had to go because me and Webster had an appointment to get to."

Laurie leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, and studied Alex's face. "Did he sound comforted when you hung up?"

"I, uh . . ." She nervously gathered her hair back into a ponytail, then released it when she realized that she didn't have an elastic. "I don't know. I kind of hung up a little fast."

"You hung up on him?" Maggie translated. "Again?"

"Geez, Mags, it's only happened twice! You're making it sound like it's a habit of mine."

Maggie raised her eyebrows. "I'd say twice in a row is getting pretty close to being a habit."

"Bite me."

"Okay!" Laurie interrupted, deliberately overdoing the cheer in her voice. "Let's stop sniping and get back on topic, shall we?"

"Yeah, sure."

"Whatever."

She gave her two younger sisters a wry look and said in a completely unexcited monotone, "Stop, your enthusiasm is killing me."

"Guys . . ." Alex sighed. "Maybe I don't really need to do anything. I mean, it's over. It's been over for a year. He's the one who broke it off, and -"

Maggie cleared her throat pointedly. "As I recall, technically you're the one who didn't accept his apology and stopped answering his calls. You know, just so we can be exact about things, here."

Alex directed an annoyed glare at her. "Shut up. My point is, he's there and I'm here and it's not like we're going to be running into each other any time soon, so . . . why do I need to do anything about this other than call him up, say he should forgive himself, and hang up again?"

"Alex," Laurie said with a sigh, leaning closer to her, "you're in love with the guy. I'd say that's a pretty big reason 'why.' If he wants to make up, you're just cutting off your nose to spite your face if you ignore the overture."

"Ok, first of all," Alex said tightly, "no one, including his mom, has said anything about making up. That's not the issue here. And second of all, even if it _were _the issue, did you not hear me five minutes ago when I said that making up would be pointless, because he'd probably just do it again anyway?"

"You, my dear," Maggie announced, giving her a not-so-gentle slap on the back, "need to pull your head out of your ass. You're so _totally_ still mad at him, but instead of admitting it, you're trying to cover it with all this false logic. You're forty years old, Alex. Stop acting like a teenager."

"Oh, I'm acting like a teenager, huh?" Alex shot back. "And how do _think _I should be handling this? Sighing dramatically and falling back into his arms? Calling him up and declaring my undying love? How is either of those any more mature than keeping my distance?"

Maggie heaved a sigh and pulled back to look at Laurie. "Do you want to try to talk some sense into her?"

Laurie thought about that for a second. "I don't think it'd do much good at the moment." Gentling her voice, she leaned over toward Alex again. "You've had a crazy day, hon. Give yourself some time to unwind and process all this, and _then _start worrying about what you think and what everyone else thinks."

Alex snorted and jerked her head toward Maggie. "Tell that to _her_. I'm not the one calling people names."

"No," Laurie agreed, "but you _are _the one who sounds like you're about three steps from a temper tantrum. And as much as we love you, Maggie and I don't particularly want to be here for that. So just . . . let it go for the night, ok? At least, as much as you can. Try to get some sleep."

"You're such a mother," Maggie told Laurie teasingly. "But she does have a point," she added, returning her eyes to Alex. "There's nothing you can do tonight except dwell on it, and that's pointless. Go to bed, take a long, hot shower, distract yourself. Relax. Tomorrow morning, I promise you, you'll have a lot more energy to deal with this kind of shit than you do now."

With a sigh, Alex let her head fall onto Maggie's shoulder. "This sucks."

"I know it does," she agreed, giving her a hug. "Men are pigs and all that, I agree, but there's nothing you can do to change that between now and when you wake up tomorrow morning."

"I guess." She managed a weak smile for her sisters. "I guess I should thank you guys for coming over."

Maggie just rolled her eyes, but Laurie waved a hand dismissively and said, "Hey, it was either this or watch basketball with Joe and his friends. Trust me, you're the lesser of the two evils. We're your sisters, Al! It's our _job _to do this. They'd revoke our 'big happy family' membership if we avoided it."

That got a slight smile out of Alex, and Laurie smiled back, giving her a pat on the hand. "It'll work out. Have a glass of wine, then go to bed, how's that sound?"

Shrugging, Alex dredged up another weak smile. "Sounds better than trying to figure out what the hell I'm feeling right now."

"Good girl." Extricating herself from the jumble of arms their group hug had become, Laurie stood up. "I'm really sorry, but I have to go so I can put the kids to bed. Call me if you need me, ok?"

"Ditto," Maggie said, copying the movement. "Except minus the 'kids' part."

"Your husband _is _a kid," Alex said with a roll of her eyes.

Maggie grinned and leaned down to give her another hug. "Yeah, well, chasing him around keeps me in shape. I'll call you tomorrow, ok?"

Alex nodded, lowering her head quickly when Laurie hugged her and she felt tears prick at the back of her eyes. Of course her sisters had to leave, she reminded herself as the door shut behind Maggie and Laurie; they both had homes and people to go take care of. She knew that. She had no right to expect them to stay the night.

It was just that she was afraid that being alone, as she was now, would mean that she wouldn't be able to get rid of her thoughts of the man who refused to leave her in peace.


	11. Experimental treatment

Bobby was held up at work that night, having been put under orders to catch up on his paperwork or risk reassignment, and by the time he got to Pine Brook, it was almost nine o'clock. He gave the charge nurse a sheepish smile as he passed, silently asking permission to break the rules yet again. The nurse just smiled back, rolled her eyes, and pointed toward the TV lounge at one end of the hallway. "She's in there. Don't keep her up too late, Detective."

"I won't." And with that, he left the nurses' station behind and headed down the hallway, dreading the inevitable confrontation with his mother.

When he stepped into the lounge, he found her seated with two other woman around her age, playing a card game that looked suspiciously like poker. "Mom?"

Frances looked up at him and promptly laid her cards face-down on the table. "You'll have to excuse me," she told her companions. "That's my son."

"Of course," said Ginny, who was sixty-five and had snow-white hair, giving Frances a beatific smile.

Abbie, on Frances's other side, wiggled her eyebrows jokingly. "And a fine son he is, too," she said, pretending to fluff her hair, which was currently dyed an unnatural shade of red. "Although he doesn't look very happy with you at the moment, Fran."

Smiling slightly as she stood up, she nodded. "He's probably not," she whispered conspiratorially to the two women. "I've done a little meddling this week."

"Mom," Bobby repeated impatiently from his position a few feet away. "I need to talk to you."

"Of course, dear," she replied, giving him a calm smile as she crossed the room toward him. "Let's go back to my room."

He silently followed her down the hall, fully aware of the air of self-satisfaction that hung around his mother. She knew exactly what this was about, he realized. Even more worrisome, she didn't seem apprehensive about his reaction. When had his mother become such a sanguine schemer, anyway?

"I take it the letter reached her?" Frances asked conversationally as she led him into her room and settled down on the rocking chair he'd bought her a few months ago.

Bobby just looked at her for a few seconds, surprised by her easy admission. "Yes, it reached her. And then she reached me. Loudly." He sighed. "You had no right to do that, Mom. I told you Alex wasn't your business."

She shrugged. "And I told you that anyone who's got you this upset is certainly my business. She called you about it, I assume, since you said she was 'loud'?"

"Yeah, she called me," he said, grinding his teeth in frustration at her careless attitude. "She was furious, and I don't blame her. How could you do something like that?"

She gave him an assessing look. "Well, you certainly weren't going to volunteer to do it."

"Damn right I wasn't," he snapped, turning away from her and beginning to pace. "Because no one, including me, has any right to invade her life like that."

"Hmm," Frances murmured noncommittally. "Did she have any comments on what my note actually said?"

"Oh, don't get me started on that!" He pivoted and starting pacing in the opposite direction. "She read part of it to me, and -"

"Oh, dear." She looked down at her hands and swallowed. "I didn't think she'd do that. You have to understand that what I wrote -"

"Was intended for her eyes only?" he finished for her. "Too late. You told her I'm in love with her, Mom! And that I think she hates me!"

Ah, Frances thought, so Alex had only shared the beginning of the letter with him. Smart woman. "Well, both of those things _are _true, honey," she pointed out.

"That's not the issue here," he groused. "Whether they're true or not, you had no right to -"

His rant was cut off before he could really get started by the ringing of his phone, which echoed loudly off the cinder block walls of the hospital room. "Damn," he muttered, then gave her an apologetic look. "Sorry. I forgot to turn it off. I'll -"

"No, no," Frances broke in, waving a hand dismissively. "Go ahead and answer it. I'm not going anywhere in the meantime, except maybe back to my card game."

He gave her a quick, grateful smile, then turned his attention to unclipping the phone from his belt. The number on the caller ID display wasn't familiar, but he was in too much of a hurry to get rid of whoever was on the other end of the line and get back to reprimanding his mother to worry about that. "Goren."

For a long moment, there was silence on the other end of the line, and then his caller took a shuddering breath.

"Hello?" he tried again when the breath wasn't followed by any words.

"Bobby," a voice said thickly, then paused for another breath. "I . . . I'm sorry. I shouldn't have called. I'm -"

Alex. And she sounded . . . wrong. "Wait!" he blurted, afraid she was going to cut off the call. "Don't hang up, Alex. What's . . . are you ok?"

Silence for another minute, punctuated only by the unsteady breaths she took every few seconds. "No," she finally managed truthfully. "But it's stupid to . . . there's not anything you can do."

At a loss for what to do with himself while he listened, he glanced down at his watch, which said that it was past ten. A few seconds of time-zone math informed him that it was the middle of the night in New York, and he felt his anxiety level rise a little more. "I can listen," he told her gently. "Tell me what's wrong."

Next to him, Frances cocked her head to the side and studied his face for a second, then stood up and headed for the door, mouthing _poker game _at him. "Take as long as you need, honey," she added in a whisper.

Bobby, his attention completely focused on the strained voice in his ear, hardly noticed her departure. "Alex, talk to me," he pleaded, unsettled by her silence.

"I . . . I'm sorry," she stammered again. "I . . ."

"Tell me," he said again, injecting a note of authority into his voice in the hopes that she'd automatically obey.

"My mom . . ." She said it so quietly he almost didn't hear it, and he was about to ask her to repeat herself when she went on, "My mom . . . had another stroke. The hospital . . . they couldn't . . ."

"Oh, god," he breathed as he realized what it was that she wasn't saying. "Alex, I'm so sorry . . ."

"I shouldn't . . . have called you." Her breathing hitched in the middle of the sentence, as if she'd been crying so hard that she was hyperventilating and couldn't quite stop. "There's nothing you can . . . I'm sorry."

"Stop apologizing," he told her, lowering himself into his mother's rocking chair and scrubbing one hand over his face. "You can call me whenever you need to; you should know that. When . . . when did she . . .?"

"Tonight. It . . . I had just fallen asleep when my dad called me." She was silent for a moment, fighting back tears, and then let her breath out in a rush. "She . . . she was gone when I got there."

"Alex . . ."

"I thought I was . . . was ok," she went, sounding stricken. "And then everyone went home with their families and I came back here and . . ." She took a deep breath. "I didn't know who else to call."

"Where are you?" he asked, belatedly remembering the unfamiliar phone number his phone had showed.

"I, um . . ." There was silence for a second, as if she was looking around and trying to figure out the answer to his question. "Mid-town, somewhere. I just . . . I needed to distract myself, so I went for a walk."

Well, if she had to be wandering the streets of Manhattan at two in the morning, he supposed he should be glad she was doing it in one of the safer areas - but even midtown wasn't a place he wanted her to be while she was so upset. "Are you on a pay phone? Where's your cell?"

"Uh . . . it's here. And I am on a pay phone. I kind of forgot I had it." She tried and failed to smother a sob. "Bobby, she wasn't . . . she wasn't even seventy. She was doing really good. I don't . . . I don't understand why . . ."

"I don't know, honey," he said softly. "I wish I did." Mary Eames had always been a fixture in Alex's life, he knew - the one who bandaged scraped knees and scraped hearts, who explained about boyfriends and bosses - and he wished desperately that he could give her some bit of logic to hold on to tonight. Unfortunately, if there was a logical explanation in this situation, he couldn't think of it. And for the moment, he was more concerned with her safety than her peace of mind. "Alex?"

"What?"

"Would you do something for me right now?"

She paused, then said, "Like what?"

"Look around and figure out your cross-streets. Do you have money on you?"

"I . . ." He could almost see her fumbling through her pockets before she sighed and said, "No. I have my keys, but that's . . . the only thing I bothered to grab."

"Is there anyone you can call to come pick you up?"

"No!" she said quickly. "They're all asleep. I can't . . ."

That didn't surprise him; he hadn't really expected her to be willing to let her family see her like this. He was just glad he still had some friends in the city. "Ok, that's fine. I'm going to give you the phone number of one of my friends. His name is Sammy, and I want you to hang up with me and call him. Tell him where you are and that I need him to pick you up, and then call me back. Can you do that?"

"You want me to get a ride with a stranger?" she asked dubiously. "In the middle of the night?"

"He's a nice guy, I promise. And he owes me one. He'll get you home safe."

"Bobby, I -"

"Please," he said softly. "You know you shouldn't be out on the street right now. I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight unless I know you're ok."

"Bobby . . ." Her voice trailed off and he could hear her take another steadying breath. "Ok. Give me his number."

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Alex watched a black pickup slide to a stop in front of her. "I think he's here," she told Bobby. "Black truck with flame-orange detailing?"

"That's him. I'll let you go now so you don't have to juggle the phone getting in and out of the car. Give me a call when you get home, if you feel up to it, ok?"

"Ok," she said quietly, watching a dark shape climb out of the cab of the truck and circle around to her side. "Bobby, I . . . thank you."

"Don't thank me," he replied gently. "Just promise me something."

"What?"

"I don't care what time it is - if you need someone to talk to tonight, or tomorrow, or whenever . . . you _call me_. Got it?"

She sniffled, feeling the veil of loneliness beginning to slip back over her at just the anticipation of his voice being gone again. "Yeah," she managed in a near-whisper as the mysterious Sammy leaned back against the hood of the truck and watched her silently. "Got it."

"Good. Try to get some sleep tonight, if you can. And . . . and Alex?"

Sammy seemed to be in no hurry to interrupt her conversation, and she wondered just how big a favor he owed Bobby, to wait so patiently for the person he'd been sent after. "Uh, what?" she asked Bobby after a second, realizing that he'd said her name again.

"I . . ." _I love you_. The words were on the tip of his tongue, but at the last second he swallowed them. She didn't need to have any more surprises thrown at her than she'd already had tonight. "I'm here if you need me," he said instead. "Now, hang up the phone and let Sammy take you home."

Her mind jumped forward to the unpleasant thought of her empty apartment, and without further comment to Bobby, she distractedly closed her phone and shoved it into her pocket.

"You Alex?" Sammy asked, taking a step closer and moving into the light of a street lamp.

Somehow, she wasn't surprised to find that she was facing what looked like a Hell's Angel gone semi-legit. Sammy had long, dark hair that was partially covered with a red, white, and blue bandana he'd tied around his head, and the stubble on his face looked like it had been there since Clinton was president. His jeans and t-shirt were clean, though, and his black leather jacket, though beat-up, was free of any of the chains and studs that passed for fashionable among the biker set.

It wasn't until Sammy cleared his throat that she realized she'd been staring. "Yeah," she said quickly, applying all her willpower to forcing back the tears that had begun to fall while she spoke to Bobby. "Sammy?"

"Yep." Moving as if it were a natural action for him, he pulled open the passenger side door of the truck and stood by, spotting her, as she barely managed to hoist herself in because of the lack of running boards. "Sorry 'bout that. I don't drive a lot of women around."

"It's ok," she said quietly, buckling her seatbelt.

Sammy slammed the door behind her, then walked around and climbed into the driver's seat. "So, where to?"

She gave him her address and then, unable to squelch her curiosity, took a moment to study him. "Are you the tattoo guy? The one who identified the Serbian Tigers tattoo?"

He looked over her with raised eyebrows as he pulled away from the curb. "You have a good memory. That was a couple of years ago." Moving his eyes back to the road, he added, "I guess that means you're the girl who was his partner, then? I wasn't sure."

Her breath caught as his use of the word _was _struck her. "I . . . yeah. Yeah, I . . . I was."

Sammy glanced quickly at her as he caught the note of . . . something . . . in her words. "Are you ok? Do I need to take you to the hospital or anything, I mean?" Noticing her look of confusion, he shrugged. "Goren wouldn't have called me out unless it was really important to get you . . . somewhere. Wherever that may be."

She shook her head. "No. No h-hos-" The word caught in her mouth and she had to force it: "No hospital." _Take me to LA,_ her subconscious cried. _I need Bobby with me to make it through this! _She couldn't say that, though, and so she murmured only, "Just . . . home."

* * *

She'd hung up on him yet again. He wondered if it had become a habit of hers, or if only he got the special treatment.

"Robert?" Frances's tentative voice asked from the doorway.

He moved his eyes to her and stuffed his phone into his coat pocket, not bothering with its belt holster. "Yeah. Sorry about that."

She ignored the apology in favor of moving closer to him and watching him worriedly. "What's wrong? What was that about?"

"She . . ." He looked down at his hands and sighed. "Alex's mom died. She's . . . devastated."

"Oh, honey," Frances breathed. "I'm so sorry. Did you know her?"

He nodded slightly. "I met her a few times. At . . . holidays and things. She was . . . everyone loved her."

"The poor girl." She moved past him to sit on the bed. "You were on the phone a long time. Is she ok?"

He didn't like having to think about that question, but he answered it honestly: "Not really. She . . . the rest of her brothers and sisters are married, and they all have someone to share the grief with. Alex . . . doesn't."

"Bobby." He looked up in surprise when she put a firm hand on his knee. Meeting his eyes and enunciating the words emphatically, she said, "I don't need you here, but she needs you there. You'll hurt her worse if you stay here. Do you understand me?"

Mutely, he nodded.

"Good. Can you get time off from your job?"

He nodded again. "Riley'll cover for me. He . . . he likes her," he added with a reluctant smile.

"Okay." With an air of determination about her, Frances jumped to her feet again. "I'm going to go get a phone book, and then we can start calling the airlines."


	12. Autoimmunity

Bobby wasn't sure what to expect when he stepped off his flight into Newark Airport the next morning. In the short conversation he'd had with Alex after Sammy dropped her at her apartment, her only reaction to the news that he was coming to New York was a quiet, "Oh. Do you need someone to pick you up at the airport?"

It wouldn't be that easy, he knew. She'd been emotionally numb, not to mention exhausted, when he spoke to her last; now, on a new day after - he hoped - at least a few hours of sleep, she'd be realizing what she'd agreed to. He was just praying she didn't tell him to get right back on his plane.

Since he had so deliberately prepared himself to be surprised by his first look at her, he managed to react with only mild surprise when he walked out of the gate area and found a disturbingly pale Alex standing in front of him, flanked by her sister Maggie, whose face bore a dark scowl. "Uh, hi," he said nervously, moving a step closer to the two women and adjusting his carry-on bag on his shoulder.

Neither woman said anything, although he thought he saw a flicker of something on Alex's face.

"Alex?" he tried again, looking from her to Maggie and back. "Are you -" He broke off in surprise when, with no words or change of expression, she closed the gap between them and threw her arms around him, resting her head against his chest in the way that had once been so natural for them both. Reflexively, he returned the hug, reminding himself to be grateful for what he was getting and not to push, and he allowed himself a few seconds to savor the feel of her against him before he moved one hand up to her hair. "Alex."

She pulled back as much as her tight hold on him would let her, and looked up at him silently.

Her eyes were red and her eyelashes spiky, and he could tell she'd started the day crying and hadn't stopped. "I'm so sorry," he told her lamely, feeling like there ought to be better words. "How are you doing?"

"She's not going to just start talking to you," Maggie spoke up, glaring at him from behind her sister. "She hasn't said more than two words at a time this whole morning."

Taking in that statement, he moved his gaze back to Alex and gave her a questioning look. She allowed him to meet her eyes for a split second, then just shook her head and pressed her face into his shirt again, harder this time. He could feel her tears begin to soak through the material of his t-shirt and, deliberately pushing Maggie's obvious displeasure out of his mind, he cradled Alex's head in his hand and rested his cheek on her hair, murmuring whatever comforting words he could think of.

It took a few minutes for her to regain control of herself and slow the tears, and when she finally dropped her arms from around him and moved to pull away, he had to force himself to loosen his hold and let her go.

She took his hand then, as if she needed to keep in contact with him, and studied him, eyes lingering on his face. He waited, knowing that if she was going to send him back, it would happen now.

Instead of issuing the rejection he feared, she reached up and brushed the tips of her fingers over his cheek. "Thank you for coming." It was said in a bare whisper, but he had no trouble understanding the look in her eyes.

"Guys." Maggie sounded more subdued now, the edge of anger gone, a least temporarily, from her voice. "We should get going."

Not releasing his hand, Alex turned and looked back at her sister, nodding. "Did you check any bags, Bobby?"

"I . . . uh . . ." Distracted by the death grip she still had on his hand, he tripped over his words and had to try again: "No. Just . . . this," he managed, using his free hand to gesture to the small rolling suitcase he'd carried onto the plane.

"Not planning on staying long, are you?" Maggie said coldly as she turned to lead them out of the airport and toward the parking garage.

Bobby was stunned by the accusation, even though he knew Maggie had every right to make it, and all he could bring himself to do in response was look down at Alex and silently acknowledge his guilt.

"Maggie," Alex admonished quietly, not looking at him as she delivered the rebuke in a flat voice.

Not turning to face them, Maggie shrugged and muttered an unapologetic, "Sorry."

* * *

He practically had to pry her hand from his so they could get into Maggie's car, an act which caused Maggie to snort indelicately and roll her eyes as she walked around to the driver's seat.

"Alex . . ." he said slowly as he watched her slide into the backseat beside him, leaving the passenger seat next to Maggie empty. "Shouldn't you . . .?"

"No," she said, offering no further explanation. "Maggie, we can go."

Without comment, Maggie started the car and did as her sister asked.

In the backseat, Bobby looked warily at Alex, trying to figure out what, exactly, was motivating her complacent behavior. He hadn't expected her to come out swinging, exactly - not when her mind was occupied with much more important things - but neither had he expected her to jump into his arms as though nothing had ever happened.

Comfort, he decided after a second. As he had pointed out to his mother just the other day, Alex had no one with whom to share her pain, and however wounded she might have been by their break-up, he still represented both the familiar and the comfortable to her.

The touch of Alex's hand as she laid it over his jerked his attention back to the real world, and he found her looking at him with a slightly worried expression. "Bobby?"

"Sorry," he managed lamely, trying not to be obvious as he stole a glance down at their hands. "Did you say something?"

Her eyebrows dipped slightly, and he could tell she'd noticed something off about his delivery of the question, but all she said was, "I asked if you were tired. You can't have had time to sleep if you caught a flight that got you here this early."

He blinked. _Had _he slept? He'd dozed off-and-on on the plane, but he hadn't even touched the bed in his apartment as he scrambled to pack his suitcase. "Um, I got a little sleep on the plane. I'm not too bad."

"Oh." She drew her hand back, returning it to her own lap so she could clasp her hands together uneasily. "I, uh, forgot to ask you last night - did you have time to make a hotel reservation or anything?"

"No. I don't really, you know, need anything fancy, so I thought . . . uh, I thought maybe you could just drop me off at whatever we pass once we get into the city."

"Oh," she said again, looking down at her hands. "I was kind of wondering if you'd be ok with staying with me."

She said it quietly, but apparently not quietly enough, because Maggie made a rude noise from the front seat. Meeting her sister's eyes in the rearview mirror, Alex gave her a look that was somewhere between angry and pleading. She should have asked Laurie to drive to the airport, she realized, although it was a little late to decide that now. At least her older sisterwouldn't take her pain out on an innocent bystander.

Bobby tried not to show his shock at that, but he wasn't sure if he succeeded. She wanted him to stay with her? In her apartment? He felt like he'd fallen down the rabbit hole into a reality where it hadn't taken a year just for them to be able to speak to each other again, let alone see or touch each other. "I, uh . . ."

"I can't explain it right now, ok?" Alex said tightly, easily interpreting the consternation on his face. "I just . . . you don't have to if you don't want to, but if it doesn't bother you . . ."

Who was he kidding? He wasn't going to say no to her, not when he was so concerned about her, not when she'd had to visibly gather her courage to ask him out loud. "It's fine with me," he told her gently, "as long as it's what you really want. If it makes you uncomfortable, I'll go somewhere else."

She shook her head. "No. I . . . I need you to be . . ."

"I will, then," he said soothingly, reaching for her hand almost automatically and then pulling back when he realized what he was doing.

She caught his hand to keep him from moving it away, then paused, seeming to reconsider. A second later, still holding onto his hand with both of hers, she shifted her entire body the few inches closer to him her seatbelt would allow.

Suppressing his inner gentleman for once, he held his ground, not allowing himself to move away even when her head came to rest on his shoulder. Leaning his head back against the seat, he raised the hand she didn't have a grip on to brush away the hair that, he knew without looking, had fallen into her face. "Alex . . . how are you, really?" he asked softly as his fingers lingered on her cheek.

She drew in a sharp breath and tightened her hold on his hand, shaking her head against his shoulder. "Not very good. I have to keep reminding myself that she's . . . she's dead, and every time I do, it . . . it hurts a little worse." Her breath escaped her on a shaky sigh as she added, "Thank you for coming, Bobby. Really. I . . . I didn't realize how much I really needed you until you got here."

There wasn't really an appropriate response for that that he could think of - a simple_, You're welcome_ didn't sound right, nor did the conceited-sounding, _Well, I'm glad you need me, _or the self-effacing, _You don't need me, Alex. You're strong enough with or without me _- and so he settled for just nodding and slipping his arm around her shoulders. "You're tired."

It wasn't a question, and she didn't treat it as one as she nodded slightly and sighed again.

Before he could think better of it, he pressed a kiss on the top of her bowed head and tightened his arm around her. "We've got a good hour until we get back to the city. Try to get some sleep."

"Ok," she murmured, wondering how he'd known that she was feeling the irresistible pull of sleep now that he was with her. "Thank you."

He sighed quietly as her breathing evened out and her head became heavier on his shoulder. He hoped she'd be done thanking him when she woke up, because every time she did it, it made the knife of guilt penetrate a little deeper into his heart.


	13. Vertigo

A/N: Canis the dog in this story is no relation to Canis the dog in my story "The Day Before You Came"...I just liked the name, so I re-used it

* * *

"You haven't changed much in here," Bobby commented inanely as he followed Alex into her apartment later that morning. A photograph of her nephew that hung on one wall had been replaced by a newer one, and her couch had been moved to the other side of her living room and pushed against the wall, but other than that, her living space looked just as it had during the many nights he had spent there over the years.

She glanced over her shoulder at him, then followed his eyes to the couch. "I needed to make room for my nephew and the dog - not necessarily in that order."

"The dog?" Bobby blinked. Her nephew was old news, but this was the first he'd heard of a dog.

His question answered itself a few seconds later when a black dog that looked like it hadn't quite shed its gangly puppyhood padded out of the bedroom toward them.

"Dog," she repeated, nodding to the animal. "Canis, actually."

The puppy perked up and trotted over to her, letting out a bark that sounded too big for his body at the sound of his name.

"You didn't need to translate," Bobby said with a slight smile, studying the four-sizes-too-big paws the dog sported. "I understood it in English. What is he?"

"Annoying, is what he is," Alex said with a sigh as she walked further into the apartment and scooped the puppy off the ground, ignoring the fact that he was getting too big to be picked up that way. "Sorry. I, uh . . . I forgot you didn't know I had him. Canis is his actual name, and we think he's mostly great dane."

"Who's 'we'?" he asked, suddenly and irrationally afraid that he was about to hear about a boyfriend of some kind who had gifted her with the dog.

Pressing her lips closed and pulling her head back to avoid getting her teeth licked, she waited until Canis had thrown his paws over her shoulder and settled his muzzle into her neck before answering Bobby's question. "He was a present from my sisters last Christmas - he came from a shelter - and we weren't sure how big he was going to get, so my mom did -" Her voice cut off abruptly then as her brain caught up to her mouth, and she lowered her face into the dog's fur, mumbling, "Never mind."

Carefully setting down his bags, Bobby moved toward her. "Your mother did what?" he prompted gently, taking the dog from her arms so he could see her face. "It'll get easier, Alex," he said when she didn't respond. "Give it time."

"I don't want to give it time!" she burst out, startling both him and Canis, who yelped loudly in Bobby's ear. "I just want my mom back!" Dropping her head into her hands, she squatted down where she stood, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. "And I know how stupid it is to say that," she added, mumbling into her hands.

"Alex . . ." He released the dog - who immediately circled around to try to lick his mistress's face - and lowered himself to the floor next to her. "It's not stupid," he told her as he tried to pull her trembling hands away from her face without using too much force. "It's . . . a perfectly valid feeling."

"Don't psychoanalyze me, Bobby," she said as she allowed him to draw her hands down and hold onto them. "That's not what I need right now."

"What is it that you need, then?" he asked quietly. "Tell me and I'll try to do it."

"I don't know." Shaking her head, she tried to retrieve her hands, but found them locked in his tight grip. "Stop it."

He obediently released her hands, but moved his hands to her knees instead of withdrawing them completely. "I'm here to help you, ok? When you think of something . . . let me know."

She stared down at the floor, trying to make some sense of the thoughts swirling in her head and, at the same time, trying to will her hands to be still and stop making her weakness visible. "I'm sorry about Maggie," was what she eventually managed to get out of her mouth, visibly confusing Bobby with the non sequitur. "She's . . . we're all upset. You're just an easy target to take it out on."

"She never liked me much to begin with," he pointed out with a shrug. "I should be used to it by now."

"Bobby, no. She liked you just fine until . . ." She broke off and shook her head, thinking better of what she had been about to say. "You know what I mean."

"Until I turned into a self-centered jerk?"

That startled a laugh out of her. "Sort of," she admitted without looking up. "But I've explained it to her. She just, uh . . . she gets angry to help her deal with bad things, whereas Laurie cries and I . . . disengage. And like I said, you're an easy target for someone who wants to be angry."

"You explained it to her?" he echoed. "How did you manage to do that, when I can't even justify it to myself?"

Slowly raising her head, she met his eyes and then looked away again. "Look, Bobby, I . . . I can't be angry anymore. I don't have the energy to fight with you while I'm crying for my mother. Can we just . . . not discuss it?"

There was silence for a second as he tried to process that. "Get up," he ordered gently then, climbing to his feet and holding out a hand to her. "Whatever makes things easier for you, we can do, Alex. You don't have to ask me for it."

Taking his hand, she allowed him to do most of the work of getting her to her feet, and a few seconds later, found herself standing only inches from him, their tightly clasped hands between them. "Come on," she said, quickly stepping back and giving his hand a tug. "I'll make some coffee. You probably haven't eaten anything today, either."

Bobby followed her silently into her kitchen, with Canis trailing behind. "You don't need to make anything, Alex. I can just -"

"Be quiet," she admonished without looking away from the cabinet she was searching through. "I have to eat too; I might as well feed you while I'm at it."

"Sorry. Do you . . . want any help?"

"No. Sit, Bobby. You dropped everything to come all the way out here; now you deserve to rest." She finally fished the coffee can out of the back of the cabinet and set it on the counter. "Breakfast is going to have to be toast, anyway. I don't have anything else."

He looked at her worriedly. "Is that normal for you?"

"I eat just fine," she said defensively, anticipating where he was going with the question. "You're sitting right in front of me; do I look like I've wasted away to nothing? No, I don't. What is it with you people?"

"What people?"

"You! And Webster!"

Making a conscious decision not to argue with her, he shifted topics. "How is it working with Webster? Less infuriating than with me?"

She looked at him in surprise. "You weren't infuriating. Well, not much past the first few weeks. Ok, and occasionally after that." Rolling her eyes as she realized the absurdity of what she just said, she shrugged. "Webster's ok. It's interesting to find myself being the unorthodox one in the partnership, I can tell you that. How about you? What's Riley like - besides 'nosy'?"

He watched her set a pot of coffee brewing, trying to keep his mind in the present and not let himself think about the familiarity of their positions. In the past, she might have teasingly plopped herself down on his lap while they waited for their morning coffee. Today, she leaned against the counter, watching the black liquid fall as she waited for him to answer her question. "Riley?" Bobby managed after giving his head a shake and telling himself to snap out of it. "Uh, he's ok. He's actually one of the better partners I've had, besides you. Well, at least if you don't count the nosiness. I really am sorry about that, by the way. I don't know what made him think -"

She cut him off with a dismissive wave of her hand. "Whatever it was, you must be a carrier, since your mom caught it too." Not waiting for his response to that, she turned back to the counter and picked up the now-full coffee pot. "You still drink yours the same?"

"My mom . . ." he echoed with a groan. "I'm even more sorry for that. I can't believe she thought it was a good idea to send you a letter . . . pleading my case, or whatever it was she meant to do."

"Coffee, Bobby. Answer my question about the coffee. We can talk about your mom _after _I have caffeine in my system."

He blinked. "Uh, yeah, I drink it the same. Look, why don't you, uh. . . let me take you out to breakfast? You did say you have no food . . ." he said cautiously as he took the mug she handed him.

"No." She picked up her own mug and did her best to hide her face in it then, not wanting him to see the pain in her eyes. "But thank you for the offer," she added a second later, realizing how abrupt her refusal had probably sounded. "I just . . . don't feel like going out."

Of course she didn't, he mentally chastised himself. The woman's mother had just died, and all he could do was sit here and make it sound like he wanted to go out on the town? What the hell kind of support was _that, _to offer to her? "I'm sorry. I . . . didn't think."

Alex just nodded and took another sip of coffee. "Tell me more about Riley. Did he mention to you that he called me a 'cracker'?"

"A cracker?" he echoed. "As in, a redneck?"

"No, I think he meant something more along the lines of 'firecracker.' He was impressed for some reason when I told him to tell me why he was calling or hang up."

Bobby couldn't hold back his smile, even though he knew it was inappropriate. "He's . . . pretty unconventional, himself. He probably thought he'd found a kindred spirit. I'm surprised he didn't say anything more offensive than that."

Turning away from him, she studied the calendar the hung on her wall, not really seeing it, but wanting to keep her eyes busy. "No, he wasn't offensive. He was too busy prying."

"Prying?" He got to his feet and crossed the kitchen to stand a few feet behind her, close enough that she felt his presence but far enough away that he wasn't impinging on her personal space. "He told me that all he said was that he thought you should call me."

Oops. It hadn't occurred to her that Riley would have kept the important parts of their conversation from his partner, although in hindsight it made perfect sense for him to have done so. "Well, he wasn't _prying_, I guess, so much as making guesses and hoping I'd confirm or deny. And then, uh . . ." She might be sealing Riley's fate by bringing up this one, but she wanted to know too badly to hold it in: "He said something about a picture."

Jaw tightening, he carefully set down his mug and shoved his hands in his pockets. "That was _not _part of the story he gave me. What . . . uh, what about the . . . uh, _a_ picture was he saying?"

She glanced at him, reading the signs as if it were yesterday that she'd last seen them. "Calm down, Bobby. All he said was that you had a picture of me that he'd seen you look at." She suppressed a sigh of relief when she saw him relax slightly. "I guess I'm just curious about what the picture is."

"It's . . ." He shook his head emphatically. "It's nothing. Just an old photo."

Alex studied his face, although she didn't need to see it to know he was hiding something from her. After a second, she just sighed and shrugged. She didn't have the energy or the will to play twenty questions with someone as closed-mouthed as Bobby today. "Oh. Ok. Listen, we should . . . I mean, I don't know what you're comfortable with doing while you're here, but I have to . . ." Forcing herself to a stop, she took a steadying breath. "I have to meet with my family this afternoon. To talk about . . . arrangements. I don't know whether you'd mind coming or if you want me to go alone."

She wanted him to go to a meeting of her family? All of whom would probably be furious at her for having brought someone so disliked into their midst? "I . . ." He swallowed nervously. "I don't think . . . I mean, I'd just be in the way. I certainly have no say in any of the decisions you'll be making."

She nodded quickly, telling herself that it was juvenile to want him there with her whether he had any part in the discussion or not. "Ok. I . . . ok. That's fine."

It wasn't fine, and he could see that written all over her face. "Look, Alex, I'm sorry. It's just -"

"It's fine," she said again. "Like I said, it's a matter of what you're comfortable with."

_I'm not comfortable with any of this! _he wanted to say. _I'm not comfortable with your sister, I'm not comfortable with your grief, and I'm definitely not comfortable with trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing here, in your apartment, in your kitchen, standing two feet away from someone who doesn't want to know I still love her! _

"I'm sorry," was what he actually said, though, feeling like a broken record as it came out of his mouth. "I just don't -"

"I said that it's ok, Bobby." She forced a casual smile. "I'll be just fine going on my own, I promise."


	14. Second opinion

A few hours later, Bobby found himself alone in her apartment, wondering what had possessed him to refuse to do the one thing she'd asked of him. _Because her sister hates you_, pointed out his inner voice of reason, _and the rest of the family is ambivalent about you, at best, and you being there would only have made things less comfortable for all of them, not to mention making them resent you for inserting yourself into family business. _

Well, ok - there _was _that. But still, to not go because he feared her family's reaction was to put his own comfort above her needs.

Selfish.

Unsupportive.

With a pained groan, he threw himself down on the couch, cracking the back of his head into the wall that wasn't there in his memory of the room. "Shit!" he grunted, reaching up to rub the injured area. "Damn it, there was plenty of room in here _without _moving the -" He broke off in surprise there, startled by the puppy that had climbed into his lap. "You," he said sternly to the dog, "shouldn't -.

Canis lurched up and licked Bobby's nose, leaving him sputtering and wiping his face on his sleeve. "Stay down there," he ordered, pushing the puppy back down to a lying position on his lap. "I'm busy thinking about how stupid I am."

And stupid he was, he reflected when Canis had settled down. After all the screw-ups she'd already tolerated from him, he'd gone and done it again today.

The most frustrating part of it was that he couldn't, at least at the moment, do anything about it. Not until she came back from her family meeting, at the earliest, and he very much doubted she'd be in the mood to listen to his apologies then.

Damn.

Well, he decided after a few minutes, he might as well attempt to be productive while he waited for her - and he owed phone calls to more than one person.

* * *

"You owe me for this," Riley announced, skipping past greeting his partner in favor of getting right to the point. "Big time."

He did owe Riley, whom he had woken up with a midnight phone call less than twenty-four hours ago. Riley had listened to Bobby's semi-coherent explanation of what had happened, grunted in half-asleep annoyance, and promptly agreed to cover for him at work.

Still, there was something in what Riley had just said that made Bobby nervous. "I know I owe you, but why 'big time'?" he asked him warily. "What's up?"

"The boss is mad as hell at you for cutting out without notice, and I'm catching all the flack, but I'm still doing my best to cover your sorry ass."

Bobby sighed, picturing his short-tempered lieutenant chasing after his partner and demanding an explanation. "Ok, you're right. I owe you big time. What'd you tell him?"

"That you had a family emergency and you didn't know how long you'd be gone," Riley said as if it were obvious. "Hard to make up a better excuse when I'm still not sure what the hell it was that you mumbled at me at one o'clock this morning, other than that it involved your Alex."

Needing to curb his anxiety, Bobby reached down to scratch Canis's ears. "Sorry about that. I was . . . preoccupied. Alex, uh . . . her mother died. It was unexpected and she's . . . pretty upset."

"Damn," Riley said with a low whistle, "I can see why she would be." He paused. "Did she ask you to come out there?"

"No. I don't think it would have occurred to her. I just . . . came."

"Interesting." Riley cleared his throat, a sure sign that his next comment was going to irritate his partner. "You know . . . it's a horrible situation for Alex and all, but at least it finally got you to drag your ass out there and talk to her. Is she happy you came?"

"Her mother just died, John. She's not happy about anything."

Riley mumbled something rude, then sighed. "Ok, fine. Let me rephrase my question: has she told you to go home yet?"

"No," he admitted, trying, as usual, to decide how much information to give his partner. "Actually, she seems to find my presence . . . comforting."

Riley's attention was caught by that. " 'Comforting,' like an old flannel nightgown, or 'comforting' like 'oh, protect me, you big strong man, you!'?" he asked, letting his voice rise to a breathy falsetto at the last part.

"Shut up," Bobby grumbled, more out of habit than anger.

"I'll take that as an 'old flannel nightgown,'" Riley said, chuckling. "Because if it was the other one, I'm pretty sure you'd be in a much better mood. Sounds like you've got your work cut out for you."

Bobby moved his hand to the dog's back and suppressed a groan of frustration. Letting Riley continue his current line of questioning would inevitably lead to somewhere Bobby didn't want to go, and he really didn't feel like having to deal with his partner's nosy side today. "Look, Riley, I don't have time for this." Ok, that was actually a lie; at the moment he had nothing _but _time . But Riley didn't need to know that. "Tell the boss that when I can be more definite, I'll let him know."

Riley heaved a dramatic sigh. "Yeah, and in the meantime, you'll stay out there with the beauteous Alexandra; I'll just sit here and do paperwork. This is shaping up to be a great week."

"You're the one who kept saying I needed to get her talking to me again," Bobby pointed out.

"Yeah, yeah. Next time I'll think twice. Well, tell her 'hi' for me, would ya?"

Bobby snorted. "In your dreams, Riley. She's already had all of you she can take. Go finish your paperwork - and be glad I finished all mine yesterday so you don't have to do _it, _too. I'll check in with you again in a few days."

"Ok," Riley said calmly, dropping his guilt-inducing routine now that it was clear that his partner wouldn't react. "Sounds good, Goren. I'll talk to you later."

"Yeah, bye."

Bobby closed his phone and slumped further down on the couch. A second later, he sat up straight again and muttered a curse as he realized that he'd forgotten to mention Riley's indiscretion about the photograph. He could call back, he supposed, but at the moment, that seemed like a whole lot of work just to pick a fight.

He'd let Riley off the hook, at least until the next time Bobby checked in with him. _Then _the guy was getting his ass kicked, at least verbally.

Looking down at his phone, he sighed. He'd promised to call his mother once he was in the city; unfortunately, he was likely to get _his _ass verbally kicked when he did. Although she hadn't said it in so many words, he knew she was hoping that he and Alex would take one look at each other and fall back in love. When he told her about his day so far - which had involved little looking and no falling in love - she'd have a lecture ready and waiting on the topic of how to apologize to a woman.

This was _not_ going to be fun, he thought with a sigh as he opened his phone and started dialing.


	15. Bed rest

"I'm sorry Robert," a nurse told him five minutes later. "Your mother is in a group session right now, and you know how strict they are about no interruptions. Would you like to leave a message?"

Damn! He'd been so busy worrying about what his mother was going to say when he called that he'd forgotten about the time zone difference. "Uh, no, that's ok," he told the nurse. "Will she be able to return the call later tonight?"

"Oh, sure. I can't give you a time, but I'm sure she'll get back to you as soon as she can - probably after dinner. By the way, she's been talking about you nonstop today."

"Has she?" he asked politely. Somehow, that no longer surprised him. "After dinner is fine," he told the nurse. "Thank you."

"Of course. I'll have her call you as soon as possible."

"Uh, right. Bye." As he hung up the phone, Bobby closed his eyes and groaned. He'd gotten a reprieve from talking to his mother, but now he was left with nothing to occupy himself with while he waited for Alex to return.

"So," he sighed, looking down at the dog sprawled over his legs, "what've you got planned for the rest of the day?"

Canis raised his head long enough to give Bobby a disinterested look, then lowered it again and appeared to go back to sleep.

Ok, so the dog was planning on sleeping. Actually, that wasn't too bad an idea for Bobby's afternoon, either, considering how little he'd slept since he'd gotten Alex's call.

He was about to stand up to head for the bedroom when he realized that he had no business in there anymore. "Damn," he muttered, slumping back down on the couch, which he knew to be nearly a foot too short for him. Well, not much he could do about that. "Shove over, buddy," he told Canis, pushing the dog off him so he could take off his shoes and swing his legs up onto the couch.

Canis, who weighed nearly a hundred pounds but firmly believed that he was a lap dog, waited for the couch's occupant to stop moving, then promptly resumed his position on top of him, managing with uncanny accuracy to land a paw right in Bobby's groin as he stretched out as though the man was just another cushion.

Bobby considered pushing him off, but decided after a few seconds that the dog wasn't heavy enough to interfere with his sleep. Raising a hand to scratch Canis's ears, he settled his head back against a throw pillow and closed his eyes.

* * *

It was past eight when Alex finally trudged up the stairs to her apartment, propelled at that point only by her thoughts of Bobby and of cuddling into her nice, warm bed. The family meeting had gone as well as she could expect something so unpleasant to go, but she felt even more numb now that it was over than she had before it, if that was possible.

Her thoughts turned to Bobby and the chilly way they'd parted earlier in the afternoon. It wasn't fair to fault him for not wanting to accompany her, she knew that, although somehow she still wanted to. But she was determined to let go of it; she needed him now to recharge her emotional batteries, to act as a buffer between her and the pain of her mother's death.

Autopilot took her to her door and through the process of unlocking and opening it while she was busy with these thoughts, and it took her a few seconds after she got inside to realize that the sound of the door closing behind her had brought neither man nor dog running to investigate. That was odd, for both of them. Had Bobby gone out?

She moved further into the apartment, unsettled by the silence, then stopped short at the sight that greeted her: Bobby was stretched out on his back on the couch, his feet dangling over the edge, and Canis, as though copying the position, was stretched out full-length on top of Bobby, his head tucked against Bobby's shoulder. Both appeared to be deeply asleep.

Well, that explained the lack of reaction to her arrival.

She smiled, hardly even aware she was doing it, and set down her purse as quietly as possible. Despite his claim that he'd napped on the plane, she knew Bobby probably hadn't slept more than an hour out of the last twenty-four, and she didn't didn't want to disrupt him now that he'd finally conked out.

Besides, he looked adorable there, napping with her dog, who was nearly as long as Bobby was tall.

Adorable, yes, but probably uncomfortable as hell, she realized, remembering how he'd often complained about sleeping on her couch during important cases in the past.

Why hadn't it occurred to her to consider where she was going to put him at night _before _inviting him to stay with her? Probably, she decided a second later, because she'd been so preoccupied with thoughts of her mother that all that had registered with her was that it was Bobby, and her unconscious already knew where he slept.

God, she was tired. She looked toward the bedroom, where her bed was singing its siren song, then back at the sleeping man on the couch.

The couch really was too small for him.

She had no right to ask him to share a bed with her, and all her good sense said that she shouldn't ask him to.

Screw it. She wanted him there. Needed him there. "Bobby," she whispered, moving closer to the couch. Canis responded by lifting his head, but Bobby didn't move. "Bobby," she tried again, a little louder, as she rested a hand on the dog's back to support herself as she leaned over him.

Canis gave her what she would have sworn was a reproachful look, whuffed at her, and hopped off the couch. His movement finally woke Bobby, who blinked up at her and mumbled something unintelligible.

She had no idea what he'd said, so she just gave his arm a tug. "Come on. You can't sleep scrunched up on the couch."

Still more asleep than not, he allowed her to pull him to his feet and followed her to her bedroom, but stopped short at the edge of the bed. He may not have been fully awake, but he was awake enough to know he wasn't supposed to be there.

Alex, whose eyelids were growing heavier by the second, turned to look at him. "What?"

"This isn't . . ." He stared at her confusedly. "I shouldn't be . . ."

"You don't fit on the couch, Bobby. Just use the bed," she told him, sitting on the edge of the bed to take off her shoes. "The dog'll probably come sleep with us, too."

Who was he to argue with her impeccable logic? he decided as his sleepy brain began to clear. With a tired nod, he did as ordered, slipping under the covers fully clothed.

Alex did the same, automatically sliding closer to him until they were both lying on their sides, nearly nose-to-nose with each other.

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, giving his tacit approval for her movement, and rested his head on the pillow next to hers. "Was it bad?"

Taking a deep breath, she dropped her head into the crook of his neck, which, she realized after a second, bore the comforting smell of her dog as well as Bobby's own comforting smell. "Not terrible," she said quietly. "It just . . . hurt. I'm so tired now . . ."

He nodded understandingly, his chin brushing the top of her head as it moved. "Go ahead and sleep," he said into her hair. "I'll be here."

"Mmm." She matched his arm around her shoulders by throwing one of hers over his side. "I know you will."

* * *

The ring of his phone startled them both out of their sleep. Alex stiffened in his arms and opened her eyes to find him looking down at her. "It's mine," he murmured, absentmindedly kissing her forehead as he pulled away. "Go back to sleep."

She obeyed with alacrity, and by the time Bobby was on his feet and opening his phone, she was out again.

He moved into the living room as he checked the caller ID. It showed the number of Pine Brook; that meant it was probably his mother returning his call. "Hi, Mom," he greeted her, keeping his voice low as he looked over his shoulder to peer through the bedroom doorway at Alex's sleeping form.

"Bobby?" Frances replied. "Are you there? I can hardly hear you."

"Sorry." He moved further away from the bedroom and allowed himself to speak a little louder. "Alex is asleep. I don't want to wake her up."

Choosing to overlook the obvious question of why her son was with a sleeping Alex, she said, "How is she doing, honey?"

"Uh . . ." He thought about that. "She's really upset. I think she's glad I'm here, although she hasn't actually said so. She's been . . . clinging to me."

"Clinging?" Frances echoed, sounding genuinely curious. "What do you mean?"

"Well, she . . .uh . . ." He suddenly felt like a teenager trying to avoid telling his mother about his first girlfriend. Well, he reminded himself, it hadn't ever happened when he actually _was _a teenager. Life was just catching up with him. "She trusts me," he eventually said - a bit of a hedge, but still true. "She won't cry in front of her family."

"But she cries in front of you?"

"Yes," he said simply. "She doesn't like it, but she lets it happen."

"Hmm,." Frances wasn't unaware of the tension in her son's voice, but her intuition told her that if whatever he was hiding was bad news, he wouldn't be hiding it. "You're both ok, though? Nothing else has happened to her or to you?"

"We're both fine, Mom. Tired, but fine."

"Oh, Bobby, did I wake you up? I didn't even think . . . it's _hours_ later where you are, isn't it?"

"It's ok. We . . . I mean I . . . it was more of a nap, anyway." _We? _What kind of idiot was he to let something like that slip to his sharp-witted mother? Bobby wanted to kick himself.

"A nap," she echoed neutrally. "Of course it was, sweetheart. I'll let you get back to it, then. But please, do call again. I want to know you're both ok."

"Sure, Mom. I will. How are things with you? Win any more poker games?"

Frances laughed. "Not between last night and now, but the girls are just waiting for me to finish this call before we start one up."

"Well, don't let me keep you from your gambling. I'll give you a call within the next few days, ok?"

"That's fine, dear. Say hello to Alex for me."

"I will. Good night."

"Good night, honey."

He closed the phone and, deciding that sleep was more important than any other calls he might receive, he set it down on Alex's kitchen table rather than bring it back to with bedroom with him.

"Everything ok?" Alex murmured, turning her head to look sleepily over her shoulder at him as he slipped into bed next to her.

"Yeah. Just my mother saying hi."

"Mmkay. You goin' back to sleep?"

"Yeah." He wrapped an arm around her waist, pleased to find that she snuggled closer to him in response.

"Bobby?"

"Hmm?"

"Thank you."

There silence for a few seconds, and then: "Alex?"

"What?"

"Stop thanking me. This is where I want to be." He tightened his arm around her. "Now go to sleep."


	16. Debriding

A/N: So yeah, if last week was the week from plain old hell, this week is the week from the ninth circle of hell. I won't say there won't be any updates in the nect few days, 'cause whenever I say that I end up being wrong, but I will say that you shouldn't expect too much writing out of me until next thursday-ish

* * *

Alex awoke a few minutes before sunrise, as if her old habit had been resurrected by the presence of the man next to her, and for a long moment before the fog of sleep began to fade from her brain, the only thing she was conscious of was the reassuring warmth of the familiar arms that surrounded her.

She had always enjoyed the experience of sharing a bed with Bobby - the protective way he curled his body around hers, the tickle of his rhythmic exhalations on the back of her neck, the scent that was distinctly _him _that surrounded her - and during the first few second after she returned to full consciousness, she simply savored these physical sensations.

Then she became aware of the fact that she was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, not pajamas, and the arms wrapped around her were covered with long sleeves. That wasn't right; both of them rarely wore clothes to bed at all, let alone street clothes. Something was . . . wrong.

_Mom. _

It hit her like a body blow: her mother was dead and the man sharing her bed had been gone for a year.

The jerk of her body as reality penetrated her sleepy mind was violent, as if she had been shot, and even as Bobby opened his eyes a few seconds later, he was reflexively tightening his hold on her in response to it. "Alex?" he murmured quietly, trying not to let her hear the instinctive concern her movement had caused in him.

She pressed her lips closed to suppress a sound that she knew would be disturbingly like a whimper if she let it out, and drew in a slow breath through her nose, then let it out. "Yeah," she muttered, acknowledging his query. "I'm ok."

Loosening his arms and shifting his weight backward, Bobby put a few inches of space between them, then pressed a hand against her shoulder, urging her onto her back while he remained on his side so he could see her face. "You don't sound very 'ok'."

There was silence for a second as she considered denying it, but in truth, she knew it was really only a matter of whether he got the information out of her the easy way or the hard way. "I am, really. I just . . . for a second, I forgot she was gone, and then . . . I remembered."

Dropping his head closer to hers, he took one of her hands in his, rubbing his thumb over the back of it. "I'm sorry."

Alex just shook her head. "I woke you up," she said apologetically, purposely changing the subject. "I'm sorry. I'll . . . you can go back to sleep," she went on, moving to reclaim her hand. "I need to get in the shower."

He tightened his grip just enough to counter the force she was pulling with. "You didn't wake me up." Well, technically, she had, but he knew that telling her that would do neither of them any good. "I'm still on LA time. My sleep schedule is just screwed up." Belatedly processing the second part of her statement, he looked at the clock and then at her and added curiously, "Why the shower, this early? Do you have somewhere you need to go this morning?"

Not meeting his eyes, she nodded slightly. "I have to go over my parents' house. There's . . . you know, people to be called and stuff, and we . . . no one wants to be alone while they do it, so we're all going to do it together."

"What time?"

"Uh . . ." She shook her head. "I'm not sure. Probably around nine, once everyone gets the kids off to school." Moving to pull away again, she found herself restrained now by both his grip on her hand and an arm he slid around her waist. "Let go, Bobby. I need to get up."

He ignored that. "Do you want me to go with you?"

"To the shower?" she replied lightly, although they both knew that wasn't what he'd meant. "No thanks, I think I can wash my hair just fine on my own."

"Alex."

With a sigh, she temporarily abandoned her struggle against his greater strength. "You don't have to go over there. I know you don't want -"

He raised a hand to cut off her speech. "That's not what I asked," he reminded her pointedly. "I asked you whether you _want _me to go, not whether I _have _to go."

"You don't want to deal with my family. That came through loud and clear yesterday."

"I know it did," he said with a sigh, "and I apologize for it. I . . . panicked. About dealing with your family, I'm . . . well . . . ambivalent, let's say - but what I _want _is to give you whatever support you need. If you'd like me to be there with you, then you've got me."

"No." She gave her hand another experimental tug. "It's not like you're my servant or something, Bobby. I'm not going to make you do anything you don't want -"

"Hey," he interrupted.

"What?"

Propping himself up on his elbow to kiss her temple, he released her hand. "It's my decision, not yours. You're not 'making' me do anything. Just answer the question: do you want me there?"

She hesitated, then nodded.

"Ok, then I'm coming. Now, go take your shower."

* * *

"Why is _he _here?"

Alex replaced the hanger she had just slung her coat over, then turned to Maggie. "Why is your husband here?" she countered. "Same reasoning goes for me. Why would I do this alone if I didn't have to?"

"Newsflash, genius," Maggie shot back. "My husband's my _husband_. Him. . .he's not even your _boyfriend_!"

"Maggie, please, just leave it." Turning away from her sister, she relieved Bobby of his coat with more force than necessary, giving him a look that cautioned him against interfering in this conversation as she did it.

"Alex, I don't -" he attempted weakly.

"That goes for you, too!" she snapped, pointing a threatening finger at him. "Leave it alone. None of this has anything to do with my social life, and neither of you has any right to try to bring it into it."

For a long moment, the three of them were frozen in a silent tableau, and then Maggie threw up her hands in exasperation. "Fine. Don't listen to me. I'm just your sister."

Alex was preparing to launch a last-ditch counterattack when she was saved by the appearance of her brother Sean. No slouch in the perceptiveness department, within seconds he'd taken in the obvious tension between his sisters and put a hand on Maggie's shoulder. "Mags, I think Laurie's looking for you. Why don't you go check." His tone made clear that it wasn't just a suggestion.

With a scowl, Maggie spared her sister one last look before turning on her heel and doing as Sean ordered.

"Thanks," Alex told him quietly. "She's . . ."

"I know. She's Maggie." He took another step forward and pulled her into a tight hug. "And you're Alex, and that means you're not going to tell anyone jack shit on your own, so I'm going to ask: how've you been doing?"

She sighed into his shoulder. "I'm ok. I'm . . . dealing."

Sean, his expression guarded but not hostile, looked over her head at Bobby, whom he had met numerous times in the past but never known well, and then lowered his eyes back to his sister. "I'm glad you have someone with you."

"Don't," Alex said sharply, pulling away from him.

Confused, Sean released her. "Don't what?"

"Just . . ." She shook her head, frustrated. "Just don't. I need to . . . who's doing what?" she asked, abruptly changing the subject as she gestured deeper into the house. "What do I need to do?"

"Need to do?" Sean repeated, giving her a probing look. For the usually-stoic Alex to be this jumpy, she had to be a lot less 'ok' than she wanted him to believe. "Uh, you should go ask Laurie. She's directing who does what. I think she's in the den. Um . . ." He glanced at Bobby again. "Sandy - my wife - is in the kitchen with most of the, uh, in-laws," he told the other man, stumbling over what term to use for the group. "I think they could use help with lunch . . . you know, if you want to."

Resisting the urge to just reach out and gather Alex back into his arms, Bobby looked at her and waited to be told what to do.

Meeting his eyes, she shrugged and tilted her head toward the kitchen. _There'll just be more questions if you stay with me_, her look told him. _I'll find you if I need you_.

* * *

"I . . . I know, Aunt Anne," Alex said into the phone a few hours later, using her free hand to tiredly cover as much of her face as she could. "She . . . would have wanted us to . . . well, just . . . can you get here?" Her aunt informed her that of course she'd get there - come hell or high water, she wouldn't miss her sister's funeral - and with the pain in the woman's voice, Alex could almost feel felt the last threads of her self-control slipping through her fingers. "I'm sorry," she said thickly to her aunt. "I have to . . . I have to go."

She dropped the phone in a movement that only somewhat resembled hanging up. The distant squawk of her aunt calling her name came through the receiver just before it hit the hard plastic of the cradle, and she knew that she'd be hearing about this later, from one family member or another. God, she wished they would all just . . .

A hand fell heavily on her shoulder and she jumped in surprise. "What . . .?"

"Sorry," Bobby said quietly. "I didn't mean to scare you. You, uh . . . I'm glad to see I'm not the only person you hang up the phone on." Bending down to put his eyes almost on level with hers, he took a second to study her face. "You look -"

"Like shit?" she supplied. "Like I've been crying for three days straight, maybe?"

"I was going to say 'like you could use a break,'" he told her, not rising to the bait her sarcasm provided. "Why don't you give the phone a rest for a while and come eat something? It's just about lunchtime, anyway, and you hardly ate anything for breakfast."

"I . . ." Alex just looked at him for a second, then sighed. "Yeah, ok." Allowing him to help her to her feet, she added hesitantly, "You're, uh . . . you're pretty good at this."

"Good at what?" he asked absently, his attention mostly focused on making sure she stayed upright now that she wasn't supported by the chair.

"Taking care of me."

He stilled for a moment, giving her an unreadable look as he tried to figure out how she could consider his offering her a sandwich to be "good" care. Then, forcibly returning his mind to the moment at hand, he shook his head. "You took care of me for years without saying a word, Alex. This is the least I can do for you now."

"Bobby . . ." Her eyes met his for a long moment, until what she saw in them began to seem too overwhelming, and then she looked away. "Never mind. Forget it. Let's get some lunch."


	17. Fresh blood

A/N: Er yeah, obviously I have had a not-good few weeks. Midterm hell, plus utter lack of mental energy/inspiration. I'm on spring break now, so I'm trying to reboot my brain back into writing mode. As a result, you get this somewhat clumsy chapter. I also have a new chapter of White Hat started, as well as a new short-ish story in the works. Hopefully I can get on the ball and get those out to you guys sometime before I get booted out of school!

* * *

Bobby was sitting in John Eames's kitchen later that afternoon, trying to think of a way to occupy himself without disrupting the family, when he became aware of a slight form dropping into another chair at the table. 

"Al-" he began, turning to the newcomer and expecting to find the familiar face of his ex-partner. Instead, he found himself face-to-face with Maggie, who didn't look much more pleased to see him than he was to see her. "Oh," he said lamely after an awkward pause. "Sorry."

"It's ok." Maggie sighed and, resting her elbows on the table, propped her chin in her hands. "Look, I owe you an apology."

Bobby blinked. "No, Maggie, you -"

"Yes, I do." She sighed again and looked away. "I've been . . . taking things out on you since you got here, and you don't deserve it. I know you probably screwed up whatever you had out in California to come back here for Alex now, and I shouldn't be . . ."

"You don't owe me an apology, ok?" he managed, more gruffly than he'd intended. "Your obligation is to your sister, not me, and as far as I can tell you haven't hurt her. So just . . . you don't owe me anything, ok?"

Maggie snorted derisively, a sound that almost made him think for a second that he was talking to Alex after all. "You know as well as I do that I couldn't hurt Alex if I punched her in the face, not with how numb she is right now. Hurting_ you_, on the other hand . . . "

Aware of the fact that she was right, he just shrugged and looked down at his hands. "Is there something I can do for you, Maggie?"

"You could tell me you're hearing what I'm saying. Believe it or not, I'm not the cold bitch you seem to think I am. I just think . . . I think we should make peace, to keep from making things any worse for Alex."

"I'm not angry with you. As far as I'm concerned, peace is already made." God, why wouldn't the woman leave him alone? The last thing he was interested in right now was jumping into the fray of family politics, especially as it related to Alex's short-tempered sister.

"Oh." Maggie clasped her hands tightly in front of her on the table. "Ok, then. Well, I'm not angry at you either. So . . . ok?"

"Ye-"

"Bobby?"

Both people at the table looked up at the woman standing in the kitchen doorway. A second later, Bobby jumped to his feet, catching a knee on the underside of the table and nearly toppling it. "Alex! What's . . . is everything ok?"

Maggie smoothly caught the table and set it back on even ground, then looked up at her sister. "Hey."

"Hey. What are you . . . what's going on in here?" Alex ventured warily, looking from one of the room's occupants to the other.

"Just talking," Bobby said as easily as he could manage as he moved toward her. "Were you looking for one of us?"

"Uh, yeah." She took another step into the room and laid a hand lightly on his back, trying to comfort herself with the contact. "We're done with the calls and I, uh . . . I want to get out of here," she finished after giving her sister an awkward look. "I mean, I'm not . . ."

"Don't," Maggie interrupted. "I know. I just didn't want to be the first one to admit it." She stood and crossed the room to hug her sister. "Go home, Alex. Laurie volunteered to stay with Dad tonight, so I'm going to grab David and head home, too. I'm just . . ."

". . . so tired," Alex finished with a sigh. "Yeah."

"Then _go_." She gave Bobby's arm a small push, knocking him into Alex. "Both of you, go."

"She's right," Bobby said quietly, taking hold of the hand Alex had on his back. "Let's go."

* * *

"Alex?" Bobby asked a few hours later, turning away from the stove to study the way she was slumped in a chair in her apartment's kitchen. "Are you ok?"

Her lips quirked in a rough approximation of a smile. "Depends on your definition of 'ok,' I guess. I'm still alive. Haven't gotten hysterical yet . . ."

With a slight nod, he turned back to their dinner, not wanting her to see his face as he said, "Maybe you should."

"Mayb- . . . what?"

"Your brother was right," he said simply. "You don't like to talk about what upsets you, so you just hold it in. Except maybe around me, but even then you don't let it _all_ out. I'm just saying . . . maybe you should, just once."

"What?" she said sharply. "You think it would do anyone any good for me to burst out crying? Come on, Bobby. you know as well as I do that hysterical people only make things more difficult for everyone."

"You're not everyone."

"Drop it, Goren. I'm not going to let myself fall apart."

"I'm not saying you should let yourself fall apart. I just mean . . ."

"Shut up!"

Surprised by her sharp words and her sudden jump to her feet, Bobby turned to face her again. "What?"

"Did I not talk loud enough? I told you to shut up. The idea of _you _telling mehow I'm supposed to deal with losing someone I love . . ." She forced out an incredulous laugh. "Do you have any idea how fucking _ridiculous _that is?"

So much for her not having the energy to fight with him about past events, he thought, stifling a sigh. "Alex, I'm not trying to tell you how to -"

"Yes, you are. And it's . . ." There was silence for a long moment as she fumbled for the right words, and then she just groaned and repeated, "It's just fucking ridiculous, ok?"

"Ok." The spatula he'd been holding was deposited on the spoon rest that sat in the center of the range and he wiped his hands on the hem of his t-shirt. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you."

"Stop talking to me like I'm some kind of time bomb!"

He dropped his hands and looked at her blankly. "Excuse me?"

"You're talking to me like I'm some . . . some . . . _unstable _person who needs to be handled with kid gloves to keep her from losing it! I'm not like your mother, Bobby!"

There was a moment of thunderous silence, and then he turned away from her and planted his hands flat on the counter, trying to regain some semblance of control over his warring emotions. "I didn't say you were like her. I know you're not. And I thought I was just being nice. If you'd rather have me chew you out, I can do that, too," he added sardonically. "Just say the word, Alex, and I'll be glad to."

"Oh, right. Of course I'm not like her, because if I _were_, then maybe I'd actually matter to you, and we both know I don't! So _obviously _I'm not anything like her, huh?"

Bobby stiffened, and she watched his fingers curl around the edge of the counter so tightly that his knuckles turned white, but he didn't respond to her taunt.

Oh god, she thought as she read the pain in his posture, what the hell could have possessed her to fling his mother in his face? After all she knew about his relationship with his mother, and what he had to have gone through in the past year to take care of her? Stifling a groan, she crossed the room to stand slightly behind him. "Look, Bobby, I'm -"

He waved a hand, forestalling her apology. "Don't. Just . . . dinner's almost ready, ok? Let's just . . . eat."

"Bobby . . ."

"I said _don't_," he bit out, still not looking at her. "It's not important."

"What the . . .?" Not dissuaded by his attempt at coolness, she laid a hand tentatively on his arm. "Of course it's important. We're fighting over it, aren't we?"

"No, Eames. _You _are fighting over it. I just happen to be in the room." He shook her hand off, not bothering to be gentle, and moved away from her. "And I should know better than to let myself be around you when you get like this."

"When I get like what?" she demanded sharply, her regret over her earlier comment momentarily overshadowed by anger at his words. "Upset over someone I love dying? How the hell would you know _anything _about how I react to loss? You've never hung around for it!"

"What the hell was I supposed to do, after you avoided me for a week and then refused to speak to me for almost a year?" He was almost shouting now, he realized as she jumped back at the sound of his voice. Well, what did she expect, stirring up resentment he thought he'd buried long ago? "This isn't doing either of us any good," he said after a second, deliberately lowering his voice. "Look, just . . ." He jerked his head toward the pan simmering on the stove. "The food's ready. Eat something. I'm . . . going for a walk."

"What? Bobby!"

Without looking back, even at her exclamation of alarm, he grabbed his coat off the door handle it had been hanging on and fled the apartment.


	18. The critical hour

"Bastard!" Startled and hurt by his abrupt departure, Alex picked up the nearest throwable object on the kitchen counter and hurled it at the door that had just closed behind him, barely registering the sound of the salt shaker shattering against the metal. "I should have known you'd run away again! Bas-" She broke off there, trying to swallow the lump in her throat, but it wouldn't budge. "Bastard." The low, hoarse voice that said the word this time was hardly recognizable as her own, and she bit her lip hard, trying to stave off the tears that were threatening to flood her eyes. "Damnit, Bobby . . ."

A wet nose brushed her hand, and she looked down to find her dog pressing against her leg, obviously disturbed by the raised voices he had just heard.

"I'm sorry," she attempted, the words catching in her throat and coming out as a voiceless whisper. "Oh, god . . ." Using the dog's back for balance, she lowered herself to the floor and leaned back against the wall, covering her face with her hands. "Bobby . . ."

Her life was spinning out of control, and she was powerless to stop it. Her mother, her beloved mother who had been her best friend for so many years, was gone. Just . . . gone, without a goodbye and without warning. Alex hadn't even been able to comfort her in her last moments, let alone keep her alive.

And then there was Bobby, who had been nothing but caring and gentle since he arrived. . . and all she seemed to be able to give him in return were words that were evasive, hurtful, or both. He'd taken it at first, but tonight had showed her that the old wounds hadn't healed for him any more than they had for her. And now he was gone, to where she had no idea, and she wouldn't blame him if he didn't come back.

So she was alone with the silent echoes of harsh words and raised voices, those from tonight and those from a year ago, and as Canis whined and climbed into her lap, she closed her eyes and allowed the pain to flow through her.

She deserved it.

* * *

Bobby walked on autopilot for what felt like hours before he raised his head and took stock of his surroundings, realizing that night had fallen while he wasn't paying attention. Unsurprisingly, his legs had taken him back toward where he had spent most of the past few years: One Police Plaza. He was standing on a corner next to the wrought-iron fence that surrounded City Hall Park. Beyond the barrier, he could see two small children exploring the wooden playhouse at the edge of the park, and he took a second to enjoy their lighthearted antics. When was the last time he'd been free enough of his burdens to even really laugh, let alone play?

Probably back at some point before his mother and his partner had become two powerful magnets pulling him in different directions, he thought with a sigh, allowing himself one last look at the children before moving on down the street. And now Alex was isolating herself further, attacking him because she didn't know what else to do to protect herself.

He'd been hurt and angered by her words, and he had left the apartment more on instinct than anything else, but the long walk had drained away the pain and left his heart pounding only from exertion, not anger. With a slightly clearer head now, he knew that her insult had had nothing to do with his mother and everything to do with being uncomfortable around him. His presence seemed to be a double-edged sword for her, providing comfort yet dredging up memories she didn't want to face.

With a quiet groan, he wrapped his hands around the bars of the fence and leaned against it. God, what a pair they were. A year ago, he'd forced her away rather than face the reality of the choice he had to make, and now she was returning the favor. If his past experience was any indicator, she was probably sitting in her kitchen now, wavering between rage and desolation at the prospect of having driven him away.

For the umpteenth time, his conscience reminded him that she had enough to deal with without him calling up old pain with his clumsy attempts to console her. He shouldn't have left her, damnit, not just to go lick his own wounds!

Once they'd been best friends. Lovers. Now they couldn't be in the same room without verbally attacking each other, and god knew they were both good at hitting each other's weak spots. Still, they were both adults, and even if her self-control was overwhelmed by her pain right now, his shouldn't be. He should know better than to allow his knee-jerk reactions to rule him when it came to her.

Alex was alone in her apartment, wounded and wondering if he was coming home, he though suddenly.

A moment later, he was striding up the street, back toward her apartment. A second after that, he was running.

* * *

Her apartment door was unlocked when he twisted the knob, and a flash of panic ran through him at the thought of her sitting inside alone, without the protection of a deadbolt. He gave the door a gentle push and stepped inside, not sure if she would welcome his return or yell at him to get out. "Alex?"

Silence answered him, but when he turned to bolt the door behind him, something crunched under his foot as he shifted his weight. He looked down, hoping he hadn't broken something the dog knocked to the floor.

On the ground near his heel lay shards of glass, some smeared with blood, surrounded by what looked like salt or sugar. He couldn't immediately identify what the glass had come from, but that worried him far less than the blood. _It's just a few drops_, he reminded himself. _If she was hurt, there would be much more_.

That didn't make him any happier about seeing it. "Alex?" he called again, a little louder, trying to keep the worry out of his voice.

She still didn't answer, but this time a dog's whine broke the silence that followed his call. Tracking the sound led him to the far side of the couch, where he found the apartment's two occupants. Alex was sitting on the ground with her back propped up against the arm of the sofa and her knees drawn in to her chest. She appeared to be asleep, with her tearstained cheek resting on Canis's back, and as he took in the redness around her eyes, the dog looked up at him and whined again as if asking for help.

Bobby gave her sleeping form a once-over, looking for any obvious wounds that could have been the source of the blood by the door, and found none. His heartbeat slowed a little at seeing that she didn't seem to be hurt, and with a sigh, he crouched down beside her and gave the the dog a comforting pat as he whispered, "Alex?"

She didn't even twitch, and after another second of observation, he decided that she must have finally given in the exhaustion that had been dogging her. As gently as he could, he pulled her right hand out from her hunched-over body and examined it.

Her fingertips had a number of small cuts on them, and there was a shallow slash across the bottom of her index finger. Nothing seemed to be bleeding any longer, although there was a visible crust of blood around the slash and a tiny shard of glass embedded in the center of it. He glanced over his shoulder at the debris near the door, mentally putting the scene together. She'd thrown something - a salt shaker, maybe - against the door, and then tried to clean it up with her bare hands and cut herself in the process.

She knew better than to try to pick up broken glass with unprotected hands, just like anyone else who'd ever dropped a teacup or a plate. She had to have been very angry, very distraught, or both to have not thought that action through. He wasn't sure he wanted to know which it had been, but either way, the glass needed to come out of her hand. Lowering his lips to her ear, he whispered her name, this time accompanying it with a gentle shake of her shoulder.

She groaned quietly, her eyes fluttering open. "Huh?"

"Hi," he said quietly, moving his hand to her tangled hair and trying to smooth it out of her face. "You ok?"

"I'm . . ." Drawing in a breath, she sat up straight and wiped her eyes, then grimaced at the pain that caused her hand. "You came back."

Bobby swallowed nervously, not sure how to respond to that. "Uh, yeah, I did. Come on," he added, giving her arm a tug to get her to stand up. "Let's clean that hand."

"My . . ." She looked down, taking in the cuts, then turned her head to see the broken glass that lay in the entryway. "I was trying to clean up the glass."

"I figured." He put a cautious arm around her shoulders, subtly herding her toward the bathroom. "Don't worry about it; I'll get it later. Right now, I want to get the glass out of your hand."

Alex shrugged disinterestedly and allowed him to pull her along. "Why did you come back?"

"I . . . here," he broke off, closing the cover of the toilet and waving her to it. "Sit." When she did, he nodded his approval and turned to the medicine cabinet, hunting for tweezers, antibiotic ointment, and band-aids.

A few seconds later, with the items in hand, he turned back around and squatted in front of her, putting everything but the tweezers down next to him. "These aren't sterile, but I can't think of a better option."

She just gave him an impatient look. "Bobby . . ."

He took hold of her hand and, as gently as he could, tried to tweeze out the glass. "I came back because I shouldn't have left in the first place."

"I . . . ow!" She jerked her hand away, giving him an indignant look. "You don't need to _stab_ me with the damn tweezers."

"Sorry. I think I've got it now . . ." He let his voice trail off as he reclaimed her hand and carefully drew the glass out of it. "There. That was the worst of it."

"Good." Fascinated, she watched his fingers stroke over her hand as he applied the ointment and began to cover the cuts with band-aids. "You don't have to -"

"Shush." He smoothed on the last bandage, then set her hand back on her leg and stood up. "That should do it. How does it feel?"

"Like I sliced my hand open on broken glass," she said with a sigh, copying his motion and getting to her feet. "What time is it?"

"I'm not sure. It's dark out, though. Probably about eight."

"Oh." Once they were out of the bathroom, she started to inch away from him. "You were gone for a couple hours, then," she said, trying to sound casual instead of painfully curious.

"Yeah." He didn't miss her attempt to distance herself from him, but he forced himself not to comment on it. "Did you eat?"

She shook her head and headed for the couch. "No. I . . . wasn't hungry."

"Well . . . are you now?"

"No."

"Alex . . ."

"You didn't really answer my question. Why did you come back? After I said something like that, and when you don't have to be here anyway . . ."

With a sigh, he sank down beside her on the couch. "I walked . . . for a long time . . . until eventually I got my head clear. Did some thinking." He shrugged. "Once I stopped being angry, I realized that you said it because you _knew_ it'd hit me hard, that it would keep me from pushing you any further. And it worked. I should have understood that and given you space, not gotten mad and run away."

"You're human, Bobby." She drew in a slow breath, her shoulders rising and falling with it, and reached for his hand. "You reacted the way any human would. And I'm sorry I said it. Your mom . . . I know how much she means to you."

Surprised by the unexpected contact, he looked down at the bandaged hand lying on top of his. "It's ok. I'm . . . sorry for pushing you."

"It's what you're good at. I don't know why I was surprised." She followed his eyes down to their hands and tightened her grip slightly. "I felt like shit, Bobby. You left and I just sat here, thinking about how everyone I love is slipping away, and I'm just making it go faster by starting fights."

He thought about that for a second. "Are you going to believe me if I say that's not an unusual reaction during the grieving process?"

"Probably not. Not with how I feel right now."

"Ok. Well, is there _anything _I can say that'll make you feel better?"

She shook her head, sighing. "I doubt it. Just the fact that you're here helps, though."

He stroked a thumb over the back of her hand, being careful to avoid the edges of the bandages. "I'm not going anywhere."

That was a lie, she knew. An inadvertent one, but a lie nonetheless. Bobby might be with her now, but sooner or later - probably sooner rather than later - he'd pack his bags and return to California, and then she'd be alone again.

"Alex?"

"Huh?" She forced his departure out of her mind and looked up at him questioningly.

"You were squeezing my hand, hard. Is something wrong?"

"No, nothing." Giving him her best attempt at a reassuring smile, she shook her head. "I just wasn't paying attention. Did I hurt you?"

"Nah." Something had gone through her head, something unpleasant; it had been clear on her face. But if she didn't want to discuss it, he'd respect that for now. Needing to do something to distract himself, he wrapped his free arm around her shoulders and pulled her a little closer. "Come here."

She went willingly, curling up against his side and resting her head on his shoulder. "Thanks."

He rubbed her arm lightly and leaned his head back against the back of the couch. "Alex?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry about what I did. When I moved, I mean. I, uh . . ." He sighed. "I know you're still angry at me. Even my mother thinks I was a jackass. She's been telling me for a year that I should apologize. So . . . I am."

"Bobby . . ."

"I was too caught up in worrying about my own choice to think about the fact that you know me too well to accept my 'nothing's wrong' act at face value. And I . . . I took the easy way out and just left, instead of trying to resolve things with you."

"Bobby, don't."

"I'm sorry. I, uh . . ." He swallowed. "I'll stop. I just . . . wanted to say that."

She raised a hand to his face, laying her palm lightly against his cheek, and looked up at him. "You're right on both counts. I _am_ still angry, a little . . . and I _can _see through you, even now. Enough to know that you regret what happened, without needing hear the words. But we . . ." She sighed. "You know how complicated it is. I need to get myself straightened out before I can really talk about this."

He raised a hand to cover the one she'd laid on his cheek. "I know. I don't expect you to say anything. I just needed to tell you."

"Bobby," she said with quiet intensity, catching and holding his eyes, "_I understand_, ok? You don't need to keep . . ." He was watching her as if she was everything important to him in the world, and her words trailed off as she felt herself fall under the spell of his eyes. "Bobby . . ."

He released her hand and moved his fingers to her chin, gripping it gently and tilting her face a little more upward. "I shouldn't do this."

"No," she agreed quietly. "It's not a good idea." Even as the words crossed her lips, though, she was leaning closer to him and laying a hand on his chest.

"Alex . . ."

"I know."

They stopped fighting it.

_TBC..._


	19. Nurse's rounds

A/N: I've got a nasty cold, so productivity may go up because i'm home all day or down because i'm spending most of my time in bed downing nyquil. Guess we'll just have to see how it goes.

* * *

Sometime in the wee hours of that morning, Alex awoke to find herself naked and locked in Bobby's arms. A few of her muscles were protesting her position, and the collective heat of their bodies was so much that she was sweating, but neither of those bothered her enough to inspire her to escape his hold. 

Their lovemaking had been frenzied, both of them desperate for comfort as much as pleasure, and feeling him wrapped around her now let her savor the sense of love and security that she had hardly had time to feel when they were frantically undressing each other. No matter how much time had passed since she'd last been there, being in Bobby's arms still felt right.

Somewhere in her still-mostly-asleep mind, she knew that everything was going to be much more complicated than the simple contentment she was feeling now, but she determinedly pushed those thoughts away and snuggled closer to him.

Reality could wait.

* * *

Reality waited until eight o'clock the next morning, when she was awakened by the sound of her apartment door opening and then closing. Her first thought as she reflexively shot up to a sitting position was that Bobby was running out on her, but a quick glance down at the bed assured her that he was still sleeping beside her. Which meant that there was someone _else _who had just entered the apartment . . .

She was preparing to make a run for the closet that held the lockbox she kept her gun in when the intruder called in a masculine voice, "Eames?"

Her partner. He must have used the emergency key she'd given him. Letting out the breath she didn't know she'd been holding, she allowed herself a quiet groan before she reached for a pair of pants and called back, "Give me a minute, Pete!"

Bobby had slept through the somewhat distant sound of the other man's voice, but her shout woke him and he turned over to look at her curiously as she hurriedly dressed. "Who's Pete?"

"My partner." She grabbed for the nearest t-shirt, not caring whether it was his or hers, and jerked it over her head. "He must have been worried about me. Don't worry about it; you can go back to sleep."

"No, I'm awake." Eyes still on her, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. "How did he get in here?"

"He has a key." A quick swipe of her hand freed her hair from the collar of the t-shirt. "Stay here."

Before Bobby could protest, as she knew he was about to, she gave him what she hoped was a casual smile and fled the room.

"Pete?" she said warily, rounding the corner toward the living room.

"In here."

She followed his voice into the kitchen, where he was unloading the contents of a large grocery bag onto her counter. "What are you doing?"

He put down a container of soup and turned to face her. "I hadn't heard from you for a few days, so I got worried. And I brought you some food," he added, gesturing to the bag. "Not anything great, but I figured it's still better than having to cook for yourself." He paused, studying her face, then deliberately turned away from her, back to the grocery bag. "How're you doing?"

Alex hesitated for a second, then moved to stand next to him and began inventorying the food he'd brought: a quart of matzo ball soup, a small pan of lasagna, a pan containing some sort of sliced potatoes . . . "This is part of your plot to fatten me up, isn't it?" she teased.

"Maybe. Answer my question."

"Pete, I'm -"

He held out a hand to stop her protest. "I'm not asking you to spill your guts. Just tell me you're not spending your days locked in your bedroom with the lights off, crying, or anything like that."

She sighed. "Ok, fine. I'm not spending my days crying in a dark room. I'm . . . I'm mostly ok. I've been spending most of my time with my, uh . . ." She swallowed, hoping he didn't notice her hesitation. "With my family."

Webster, who had been idly surveying the depths of the apartment over the breakfast bar, turned back to her and asked with raised eyebrows, "Which family member is he?"

"Who?" she replied ingenuously, knowing even as she said it that he wasn't going to buy such an obvious innocence act.

"The guy who just left your bedroom and went into the bathroom wearing a pair of shorts and nothing else." He gave her a look that was a combination of stern and amused. "I certainly hope he's not a family member."

Alex groaned and leaned back against the counter, trying to think of a good way to diffuse the situation. "He's just . . . a friend. He's staying with me for . . . until the funeral."

Crossing his arms, Webster moved to stand in front of her, setting his feet in a posture that resembled nothing so much as a bodyguard on alert. "Do you really think it's a good idea to allow yourself to . . . uh, get involved," he began, stealing another glance toward the closed bathroom door, "with someone while you're, you know, so upset over your mother?"

"Pete -"

"No, Eames, I'm serious. You d-"

"_Pete_," she interrupted loudly. "You're doing your father act again. Stop it. You're not my dad."

Not backing down, he gave her a completely unmoved look. "Your father would be saying the same thing if he were here. Someone has to - Hey, you!" he broke off as the stranger emerged from the bathroom, now wearing pants. "Who the hell are you?"

"Pete!" She gave him a shove. "He's not your business, ok? I know what I'm doing." Actually, she only _wished_ she knew what she was doing, but she wouldn't let Webster know that part. It would only give him more ammunition. "Stop, ok?"

"So, this is your partner?" Bobby spoke up from the doorway, leaning one shoulder casually against the doorjamb.

Alex muttered something obscene, then sighed. "Yes. Pete Webster," she said shortly, deliberately not making formal introductions. "He brought over some food - and now he's _leaving_," she added, stressing the last word as she seized Webster's arm and pulled him toward the front door.

"Not yet, I'm not." Webster planted her feet, shook her hand off his arm, and returned his attention to the other man. "Well? I'm waiting to hear who you are and what possible excuse you could have for taking advantage of a woman whose mother just died."

Much to Alex's relief, Bobby looked more amused than anything else at Webster's demands. "He reminds me of your father," he remarked to her with a slight smile before turning his eyes back to the man who was still standing between him and Alex. "Bobby Goren," he volunteered, holding out a hand politely. "And I don't have an excuse."

"Bobby -" Alex began, only to be shushed by a wave of his hand.

"Bobby Goren . . ." Webster mouthed the name to himself thoughtfully, obviously trying to remember where he'd heard it before, as he shook the other man's hand. Then it hit him and he jerked his head up, staring at him. "The old partner?"

"Yes," Alex said before Bobby could respond. "There, are you satisfied now?"

Webster ignored her, saying to Bobby, "I thought you lived out on the west coast."

"He does," Alex attempted again. "He's just visiting."

Both men ignored her again. Bobby crossed his arms defensively and told Webster, "Temporarily, yes. My mother is . . . undergoing some medical treatment, and I've been staying with her while she has it."

"Ah." Webster looked from him to Alex, giving her a smile that had more than a hint of smugness in it. "So I was right about you and him, after all."

"Pete." She gritted her teeth and took hold of his arm again. "You've got your explanation. Now get out, before I decide to physically kick you out. And you know I can do it."

"Yes, ma'am," he said agreeably. "Just promise me you'll watch yourself."

"Yes, Pete, I'll watch myself," she sighed, opening the apartment door and forcing herself not to actually push him out. "Now, thank you for the food. Go home."

Webster nodded and, over her head, exchanged with Bobby some kind of male look, one that Alex couldn't interpret. Then, his protective instincts apparently satisfied, he looked back down at his partner and bent to kiss her cheek. "Let me know when the wake is."

"Ok." She closed the door behind him and quickly re-locked all three bolts, then turned back to Bobby to find him watching her. "Sorry. He's never used his key before; it didn't even occur to me that he might today."

"Hmm." With a shrug, he turned to go back into the kitchen. "He's protective of you."

"Yeah," she agreed weakly, not sure what else to say. "Look, Bobby . . ."

"Don't apologize," he cut her off. "It's good to see that you got partnered with someone like that. I'd probably have done the same thing if I was him and I walked in on this."

"Yeah, well, he and I are going to have a nice long talk about him 'walking in' when I go back to work," she sighed, realizing with a slight shock that she was experiencing the plain old embarrassment of a child who's had a parent walk in on them. "I think I'm wearing your shirt, too. You can bet he didn't miss that."

"Yeah I'm pretty sure that's mine." He turned back to the grocery bag, then took a deep breath and said, "Alex . . . I think we need to talk."


	20. Scar tissue

_I think we need to talk_. She could feel the words echoing around inside her head, and for a second she considered putting her hands over her ears and just trying to pretend she hadn't heard them. She knew all too well that that strategy didn't work for anyone over the age of five, though, so after a few second she just sighed and picked up the container of soup and the pan of lasagna, carrying them toward the fridge. "I was afraid you were going to say something like that."

"I -" He stopped abruptly and stared at her. "You were?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"Because I know you," she said with a shrug. "You can't be awake without thinking, so it was only a matter of time until you tried to analyze . . . you know, this."

" 'This'," he echoed slowly. "And what, exactly, is 'this,' in your opinion?"

She slid the lasagna onto a shelf, set the soup down next to it, and reluctantly turned back to face him, shutting the fridge behind her. " 'This' is us the morning after, uncomfortable and not sure what the hell we just did and whether it made things better or worse."

Bobby, who had been expecting to hear an artful evasion, blinked. "Oh. That was . . . pretty much what I was thinking, too, actually."

"I figured. Is there anything else in that bag that has to go in the fridge?"

He was about to call her on her obvious subject-changing - he even went so far as to take a breath and open his mouth to speak the words - but before he could do it, the part of his subconscious that was so good at understanding Alex warned him to hold onto the complaint. Who was he to deny the voice of sanity in his head? He cleared his throat and said evenly, "No, I don't think so. All that's left is a pan of brownies."

"So much for that distraction," she said with a sigh, wiping the condensation off her hands with the hem of the t-shirt she was wearing. "Can I ask something before we officially start 'talking about this'?"

"Uh, yeah. Should we go . . ."

"Living room's probably easier." She started to leave the kitchen, then stopped and looked around as if she'd just remembered something. "Do you know where the dog is?"

Bobby automatically did a similar visual sweep of the room. "Uh, no. Should he be in here? Where does he usually sleep?"

"With me, but we had the door closed last night, so he would have had to find somewhere else." With a sigh, she made for the front of the apartment. "I swear to god, if he's hiding out and chewing one of my shoes to get back at me . . ."

Chuckling, Bobby turned deeper into the apartment to do his share of the search. "He's a puppy. I don't think he's that conniving, at least yet."

"Hah." Her head buried in the closet she was searching, she had to yell to make herself heard. "That shows how much _you_ know about male tantrums. Trust me, he's plenty conniving."

"Men don't have - Here he is!"

"Where?"

"Spare bedroom."

Alex jogged the length of the apartment and entered her extra bedroom to find her dog sprawled on his back across the bed, blanket wrapped around him and paws in the air. Noticing that Bobby was standing just inside the room, laughing, she reached out and poked him in the side. "This wouldn't be anywhere near as funny if you were pinned under him like I am every morning."

"He sleeps like that when there's someone else in the bed?" he asked incredulously, trying to visualize how a person could possibly fit in the small amount of space the dog wasn't using.

Smirking, Alex moved toward the bed and gave Canis's haunch a light slap to wake him up. "He can sleep with us tonight and you can find out for yourself, if you really want to know. Get up, lazybones! Walk now, or forever hold your peace."

The word _walk _worked wonders on the sleeping canine, and within seconds Canis was up and trying to launch himself into Alex's arms. "Ok, ok," she said, laughing in spite of herself as she tried to avoid getting a paw in the stomach. "I should have waited to use the magic word until we were dressed, because he's not going to leave us alone now. Want to go throw on a shirt and shoes and we'll take him for a pre-shower walk?"

Bobby nodded and started to leave the room, then paused. "Can we talk while we walk?"

"If you insist," she sighed, keeping her eyes on the dog. "Grab my sneakers out of the bedroom too, would you?"

"Sure." He took one last look at the scene in front of him - Alex, wearing his undershirt, playing happily with her dog - and allowed himself to think for a moment about how much he'd like to see the same thing every morning.

Then he smiled to himself and left the room.

* * *

"Ok," Alex said ten minutes later as they stepped out of her building onto the sidewalk, "I'm resigned to the inevitable. Go ahead and talk."

Bobby wrapped the dog's leash securely around his hand and gave her an unreadable look. "We're not going to get anywhere if I'm the only one doing any talking."

"Let's head for the park. Turn left here." She gave his arm a corresponding tug, which only unbalanced both man and dog and got her foot stepped on by a large paw before they managed to make the turn. "And I didn't say I wouldn't participate in the discussion, but since I have no idea what, specifically, you want to talk about, you're going to have to start."

"Sorry," he said, automatically tightening his grip on the leash to keep the dog from stepping on her again. "Before I say anything . . . you said there was something you wanted to ask first."

"Oh, right." Moving casually, as if it was something she did every day, she slid her arm through his and moved a little closer as they walked. "I was going to ask if you plan on this being a 'feelings' conversation or a 'decisions' conversation."

"A . . . what?" He looked down at her, brows furrowed. "What do you mean?"

"Hmm." Biding her time while she tried to think of a coherent way to phrase her question, she leaned forward to scratch the dog's ears. "Well, there are conversations where the goal is to try to understand, and then there are conversations where the goal is to work out a solution. I want to know which one this is going to be."

"I . . . guess I want to understand, then, not resolve. At least for now."

"For now?" she echoed, looking up at him teasingly.

Bobby just nodded, not willing to give her a straw man to knock down this early in the game. "For now."

Alex, all too familiar with his ability to steer conversations exactly where he wanted them to go, sighed. "Ok, fine. 'For now.' So, go on with whatever you need to talk about."

"Now?"

"Yeah, now. We can let him off the leash in here," she added as they turned into a fenced area of park set aside for dogs. "Just help me keep an eye on him so he doesn't jump the fence."

"Ok." He bent to unclip the leash from Canis's collar, earning himself a wet swipe of the dog's tongue on his cheek. Straightening up, he wiped his face on his sleeve and grimaced. "I don't know how you keep any makeup on around him."

"The trick is not getting within licking distance when you're not prepared," she said with a grin as she watched Canis lope off to tackle something a few feet away that might have been either a giant cotton ball or a shih tzu in need of a haircut. "Come on, let's walk."

"Ok." He dropped an arm over her shoulders, hesitated a second to see if she reacted, then allowed himself to relax when she just smiled up at him. "I want to make sure you know I didn't . . . you know, I didn't plan for last night to . . . happen," he managed awkwardly.

"I know." She slid her arm around his waist and studied the ground they were walking over. "You thought you were going to be staying in a hotel. I think it's pretty clear you didn't plan this. But I never thought you did, to begin with." Giving him a gentle squeeze, she shrugged. "And for the record, I didn't plan for this to happen, either."

Bobby nodded and tightened his arm around her, the tips of his fingers slipping slightly under the neckline of her shirt. "I know. Are you sorry it did?"

"No. At least not yet. Are you?"

"No," he replied decisively.

She looked up at him curiously. "You sound pretty sure of that."

"I am."

"Hmm." She twisted around to check on Canis, assuring herself that he hadn't picked a fight with the barking cotton ball, then turned back to Bobby. "You haven't had any time to think about it, though. How can you be so sure?"

"I . . ." He shook his head, not sure how to express it. "It's just something that's . . . there, in my head. I think that maybe last night . . . wasn't the wisest course of action we could have taken, but I'm not sorry we took it."

Alex just looked at him with raised eyebrows, waiting for him to resolve his statement into something that made sense.

"I mean that, well . . ." He sighed. "It's . . . too easy for people to fall back into a physical relationship and . . . convince themselves it's an emotional one."

Her eyebrows rose a little more. "Those words made sense, but I have absolutely no idea what you just said. Could you translate it to English, please?"

"I . . ." He paused for a second with his mouth open, then shook his head, purposely allowing himself to be distracted by a spaniel that came running up to them, barking, as he tried to sort out his thoughts. "No, I can't explain it yet. We need to back up a step first."

"Uh . . . ok. Back up to where?"

"Back up to . . . to the 'why'. I know what was going on in my head, but why did _you_ let last night happen?"

"Let's sit," she said, pulling him to a stop beside a bench just inside the dog enclosure. "Last night . . ." She lowered herself to the bench with a shrug. "Because you were there, and I was hurting, and I knew you could make it stop, I guess."

A slow nod from Bobby, who was being careful not to look at her and, in fact, appeared to be utterly fascinated by a small chip of paint that was flaking off the bench. "That's what I figured it was."

"What do you mean, that's what you 'figured'?" she demanded, leaning forward across his lap in an attempt to see his face. "Why did _you _let it happen, then?"

"Alex . . ."

After how eager to talk he'd seemed a few minutes ago, his reticence now was making her nervous. "I answered it when you asked; you should damn well answer it when I ask," she informed him tersely, crossing her arms.

"I know, I know," he said, holding up his hands in surrender. "It's just that I'm not sure you're going to like hearing my answer."

"Bobby." Taking hold of his hand again, she laced her fingers into his and rested their joined hands on her knee. "Try me."

He sighed, knowing she had him backed into a corner. "I did it for completely selfish reasons."

"Like what?"

"Like I was afraid it might be the last chance I ever have to . . . really be with you, and I couldn't make myself pass it up . . . even though I knew it wasn't smart."

Alex, keeping her eyes on the frolicking dogs and not on him, drew in a slow breath in response to that. "Your last chance? Why?"

"I . . ." Bobby gently pulled his hand away from hers. "It would be . . . presumptuous of me to assume things have changed enough for there to be . . . more chances."

That gave her pause. She just looked at him for a few seconds, trying and failing to read his expression, then glanced down at her hand where he had laid it on her leg when he took his away. "Presumptuous," she repeated neutrally. "Of course. Can I ask . . . how you know when thinking something _is_ presumptuous, and when it's not?"

Swallowing, he looked up at her, meeting her eyes for the first time since the conversation had started. "All I have to do is watch you. Your face . . . tells me more than you think it does."

"Oh yeah?" she asked, trying to sound only amused, rather than unsettled, as she actually was by that revelation. "So then, what's it telling you now?"

Bobby obediently studied her face, eyes drifting from her mouth up to her eyebrows and back down. "It's telling me you're afraid of what I've seen. And that's how I know that optimism would be . . . presumptuous."

He looked . . . defeated, she thought as she quickly looked away to keep him from seeing anything more in her eyes than he already had. "Bobby . . ."

"I understand it," he interrupted softly, touching her hand but not taking hold of it. "You don't owe me explanations or excuses. Look, I . . . I'm sorry I forced you into this conversation."

"B-"

Before she could even say his name again, he'd pulled away and jumped to his feet. "I think we should head back. I'm sure you have . . . things to do today."

"You have to give me a chance to explain, Bobby!" Alex exclaimed indignantly, standing up and grabbing his arm to keep him from moving away.

"No," he said tiredly, "I don't. At least, not right now. I need . . . I need some time, ok?"

The quietness of his voice alarmed her much more than his abrupt movements had. Abruptness was part of his personal style of interaction, but Bobby rarely spoke in such subdued tones. She tightened her grip on his arm determinedly. "What does _that_ mean?"

He just shook his head and concentrated on untangling the leash that has been lying in his lap. "I'll get the dog."

And that was that, apparently. He seemed to forget she was there as he turned away and headed for a knot of twisting fur and tails that vaguely resembled a group of dogs.

Alex stood and watched him for a second, wondering what the hell she'd said to set off such a strong self-defensive reaction in him, then, with a quiet sigh, shook her head. If he wanted her to know, he'd tell her. And if he didn't . . . she'd just have to figure out a way to get the answer out of him without his cooperation.


	21. Cleansing

A/N: Ooh, I had fun with this one. Amazing how much you can get done in a little 2x6 enclosure when you have two willing participants...

* * *

Alex held onto her patience for what she considered to be a fairly impressive twenty minutes after they returned to the apartment, but almost as soon as Bobby had disappeared into the bathroom to take a shower, she realized that it was a lost cause. He had cut off their earlier conversation without so much as a by-your-leave, and damn it, she wanted to know why. 

With a sigh, she pushed the sleeping dog's head off her legs, stood up, and made for the bathroom.

* * *

Bobby turned the hot water up so high that it was almost scalding and snatched up the bar of soap with a hiss of satisfied pain. He wasn't in the mood for a soothing shower, not after what he'd heard her say this morning. So he'd just "been there," had he? He shouldn't hold it against her for using him for comfort - after all, he'd been a willing participant, and he certainly hadn't quizzed her about her intentions before he pulled her shirt off - but all the same, the thought that it hadn't been _him_ she was making love to, but just someonewho could make her pain stop . . .

His hand tightened reflexively on the bar of soap, and before he could loosen his grip, the thing shot out of his hand and ricocheted off the shower wall, narrowly missing hitting him in the stomach before it fell to the ground. "Fuck," he muttered, bending down and fishing around his feet for the bar while trying to keep the down-pouring water out of his eyes.

A cold draft hit his back and he shivered slightly, but before he could stand up to adjust the curtain, an amused voice said from behind him, "That can't be the most efficient way to rinse your hair."

He froze, his hand closing around the bar of soap, then slowly stood up and looked over his shoulder at where Alex stood just outside the tub, watching him with a wry look on her face. "What are you doing in here?" he snapped.

She shrugged and, without further ado, stepped into the shower with him. "You look like you can use all the help you can get."

"I'm doing just fine on my own, thanks," he told her repressively, trying to herd her out of the enclosure without knocking either of them over.

"Not with that temper, you're not." She resisted his cautious pushes and planted a hand in the center of his chest, shoving him back against the wall. "I want an explanation," she explained conversationally. "And I didn't feel like waiting 'til you were done to get it. Shit, this water is hot. What are you trying to do, give yourself a chemical peel without the chemicals?"

"I don't know what you think I need to explain," he retorted, turning away from her into the water, "but whatever it is, it's going to have to wait until I'm done."

"No." Before he could protest that, one of her hands slid up his arm to his shoulder and she pressed her lips against his wet back. "Something I said back at the park pissed you off, and I'm not leaving you alone until I know what it was."

Bobby sighed and half-shrugged, trying to dislodge her hand. "Alex, come on."

She tightened her grip determinedly, knowing that her nails were probably digging into him but too annoyed to care. "No, _you '_come on.' You insisted we have that conversation, and then all of a sudden you shut down and decided I wasn't worth any more of your time. I think you owe it to me to at least tell me what I did wrong."

"You didn't do anything wrong," he said shortly, trying to pretend she wasn't touching him as he put down the soap and reached for the shampoo. "I was just . . . done talking."

"Tell me _why_." She ducked under his arm to stand up in front of him, blocking most of the spray of the shower from hitting him. "You don't do things like that without a reason, Bobby, so why don't you just give in and tell me what I did."

"I told you, you didn't do anything, ok?" he growled, although at the same time he reluctantly admitted partial defeat by putting down the shampoo and just crossing his arms in front of him. "You had answered my question; I didn't need to ask you anything else."

"Ok, so in other words, I gave you the wrong answer." She laid her hands on his forearms and applied gentle downward pressure, trying to uncross his arms. "I can't fix anything if I don't know what I said that was wrong. Just tell me!"

He dropped his arms and shook his head, doing his best not to react as she slipped her arms around his waist and pressed her face into his chest. "You answered what I asked you. There isn't anything wrong about that. This . . . Alex, please," he broke off as she shook her head against his skin and tightened her hold on him. "Don't."

"Why not?" she challenged, looking up at him pointedly. "You didn't have any problem with stuff like this last night."

"That was before I knew why -" Wanting to kick himself, he swiftly cut that statement off. "Never mind."

Alex gave that a second of thought, trying to assemble the bits and pieces he was letting slip and what she remembered about their conversation in the park. "Before you knew why . . . what? Why I let last night happen?"

"Yeah, maybe," he replied in spite of himself. "Now, would you please let me finish my shower?"

"No." She took a step forward, backing him into the shower wall, and reached up to take his face in her hands. "Tell me what you heard me say when I answered your question."

Small, wet body pressing into his. Bobby ground his teeth and raised his hands to hers, pulling them off him. "You already know what you said."

She allowed her arms to be pried away, but retaliated by going up on tiptoe, causing her body to slide along his. "You're right, I do. But I don't know what you _heard _- and obviously that's something different than what I said."

"It wasn't anything I needed to read that far into to understand." Giving in to temptation, he released her hands and moved his down, resting them lightly on her hips. "You were in pain and you needed to distract yourself with something, and I was it."

"Bobby," she said on a quiet sigh, unable to take her eyes away from his face and the hurt he was trying not to let her see. "That wasn't what I was trying to say. You're not just something I used as a distraction."  
With a snort of mild disgust, he pulled his hands off her hips and turned his face away from her. "You're -"

Frustrated by his refusal to voice his obvious anger, she flattened her palms on his chest and gave him a shove, although he was already up against the wall and couldn't be driven back any farther. "_Bobby_. Would you give me the benefit of the doubt here, please, for five damn seconds?" When he just blinked and stared down at her, surprised by the sudden attack, she decided to interpret that as acquiescence. "Thank you," she said with a terse nod. "I did not have sex with you because I needed to be distracted, ok? If I wanted that, I could have gone out and slept with anyone, and I _didn't_."

"You -"

"Shut up and _listen_," she snapped, rising higher on her toes and using her hands against his body for balance. "When I said that it was because you were there, I meant it was because _you _were there. You. Bobby. The guy who understands me and who needed to be reassured as much as I did."

Without moving his eyes away from her, Bobby reached out and turned up the hot water, which was beginning to fade out of the spray hitting them.

"I wasn't using you any more than you were using me, and I'm damn well offended that you think I was!" she finished, glaring at him. "Are you even listening to me, Goren?"

"Yes," he said quietly.

"Good. And do I need to point out to you that _you _are the one that came out and said you did it for totally selfish reasons?"

"No."

"Good!" Her point made, she dropped her hands and moved back, putting a few inches of space between them. "Good," she said again, more quietly this time, then turned to pull back the shower curtain. "Finish your shower."

"Alex!" Moving quickly, he grabbed her wrist before she could step out of the shower.

Not fighting to escape his grasp, but also not moving any closer, she turned back to him. "What?"

"I . . ." He gave her wrist a tentative tug, reeling her closer to him. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have assumed . . ."

She shook her head, cutting off his apology. "Don't. God knows I haven't exactly given you a lot of reason this past year to think I still want to be with you. I guess it was a fair assumption on your part."

Emboldened by her lack of resistance, he urged her a little closer until he could release her wrist and move his hands to her shoulders. "Alex?"

Her eyes still level with his chest, she drew in a slow breath and forced herself to relax slightly under his hands. "What?"

His answer was to push off the wall and turn them around until it was Alex who was pressed against the tiles. Flattening his hands against the wall on either side of her head, he leaned closer until his mouth was only inches from hers. "I don't think there's going to be enough hot water for you to take your own shower."

"Oh." Her lips slightly parted, she watched silently as his hands drifted down the wall onto her shoulders and then down her arms until they closed around her waist. "Bobby . . ."

He stepped forward and lifted her up until her head was level with his, slipping a leg between hers and holding her there by pressing her hips into the wall. "I'm willing to share if you are," he whispered just before his mouth touched hers.

With a shudder, she threw her arms around his neck, kissed him, and held on for dear life.


	22. Prognosis unknown

A/N: There's a time lapse of a few days between this chapter and the last one, just so you know.

* * *

"You damn well better have news for me." 

Bobby, who was trying to hold his cell phone between two fingers while he tied his tie with the rest, mumbled a curse. "You want news? Her mom's dead and the wake's tonight. How's that?"

Riley was silent for a second. "Sorry. I wasn't . . . I keep forgetting why it is you're out there. How's she doing?"

He thought about that, picturing her pale face as it had looked twenty minutes ago, when she had disappeared into the bathroom to shower and dress. "Better, I guess. But today's really not the day to judge by."

"Ok, then. How about yesterday?"

Yesterday, they had spent much of the day in bed, but he definitely wasn't going to mention that to his loudmouthed partner. "She's dealing as well you could expect someone who just lost their mother to deal. Oh, hell . . . Riley, hold on," he broke off as Canis, who had nosed the door open when he wasn't looking, jumped on him, paws landing squarely in the middle of Bobby's white dress shirt. "Get down, damn it!" he scolded, pushing the dog's nose away.

"What the hell is going on over there, Goren?" Riley asked, intrigued by the sudden excitement.

"I - no! Go bother Alex, if you have to bother somebody!"

"I'd be happy to bother her if you'll just pass the phone to her," Riley said cheerfully. "That's assuming she's not the one making you yell right now, of course."

Bobby snorted a sarcastic laugh. "Yeah, right. She's busy getting dressed, same as I am. In a _different_ room," he added before Riley could infer anything from the statement. "And I wasn't talking to you. Her dog just busted in and jumped on me."

"A different room, huh?" Riley sighed. "Guess that means you haven't talked her into bed yet?"

"John."

There was no need for Bobby to raise his voice; his dangerous growl communicated his point just as well to his partner. "Sorry, sorry," Riley said, deciding to make a strategic retreat. "Can't blame a guy for trying. Am I allowed to ask if she's forgiven you yet, or are you going to rip me a new one for that, too?"

"We're working on it," Bobby said shortly as his tie finally decided to cooperate and knot properly.

"You said 'we,'" Riley noted. "That's got to be a good sign. Any idea how much longer you're going to be out there? I'm all for matchmaking and stuff, but the boss isn't quite as much of a romantic."

"What's he saying?" Grabbing his suit jacket with one hand, Bobby herded Canis out the door and toward the living room.

"Besides the whole ranting about why he ever gave you a job in the first place? Well, there's the throwing paperwork at me. I'm practically buried in it. He's also talking about going upstairs - how the hell did you get this job, anyway, that he's got to go up the ladder to get rid of you?" Riley asked, only realizing as he said it that it wasn't normal departmental procedure.

"A friend." He hung back for a second before entering the living room, inexplicably nervous about facing an Alex draped in black.

"You've got good friends then, man. Want to hook me up with them some time?"

"No," Bobby muttered distractedly, forcing himself to go ahead and turn the corner into the room.

Alex was sitting on the couch, leaning over so she was nose-to-nose with Canis, who'd run ahead of Bobby. Her slouched posture blocked his view of most of her body, but he could tell that she was wearing an unassuming pair of black pants that, he imagined, she had paired with an equally understated black jacket. Belatedly sensing his presence, she let go of the dog's collar and sat up. "Hi."

Riley was busy mouthing off in his ear; Bobby knew could temporarily tune him out and not miss anything noteworthy. He gave Alex a smile and crossed the room to stand in front of her, taking one of her hands in what he hoped was a comforting grip and mouthing a quiet, "Hey."

She managed a weak smile in return and nodded at the phone. "Who's that?"

"Riley." Turning his attention back to the phone, he said, "Look, John, I've got to go. Alex is -"

"Oh, no you don't!" Riley interrupted before he could even finish the excuse. "You've been gone for five damn days; you're sure as hell not hanging up now without giving me _something _to tell the lieutenant about when you're coming back."

"I can't . . ." He glanced at Alex, who was watching him curiously, and tried to think of something he could say that wouldn't alert her to the topic at hand. "I can't discuss that right now," he finally said tightly. "I'll . . . try to find out and call you later tonight."

"Yeah, yeah." Riley sighed loudly. "I bet you will. Tell Alex I'm sorry about her mother."

"Sure," Bobby said distractedly, already pulling the phone away from his ear. "Talk to you later." He could still hear Riley's voice coming through the phone when he snapped it closed and shoved it in his pocket, giving Alex an apologetic look. "Sorry."

"It's ok. What did he want?" she asked, pushing the dog away and slowly standing up next to him.

He shook his head dismissively. "The usual. He says he's sorry he couldn't be here tonight, for the . . ." A second later, he wanted to kick himself as he watched her face cloud over. She'd momentarily forgotten her pain, and he'd gone and reminded her. He was an idiot. "Oh, Alex, I'm sor-"

"It's fine," she broke in with a lightness he and she both knew she was faking. Needing a distraction, she took a step back from him and studied his suit. After a few seconds, she looked up at him with raised eyebrows. "You have paw prints on you."

"Shit." He looked down at his chest to find that, as he had feared, Canis's enthusiastic leap had left two dusty marks on the front of his shirt. "The dog, he, uh . . ." he muttered, trying to keep one eye on her and one on his shirt as he brushed at one of the paw prints.

"Here . . ." She reached out and joined the effort, trying to dust away the other.

Surprised at the touch, he raised his head to see her face. Their eyes locked, and for a second as hers widened, he was afraid she was about to burst into tears. Then her lips twitched and, to her shock as well as his, she burst out laughing.

There was a tinge of desperation to her laugh, but even so, Bobby couldn't watch her giggle without laughing too. Suddenly, they were both gasping with startled laughter. The hand she'd been using to brush at the paw prints flattened against his chest, then fisted, gripping his shirtfront like it was a lifeline, and she leaned into him, allowing him to put his arms around her.

The laughter faded after a minute, and he could feel her breathing slowly against his chest before she picked her head up, looking slightly bewildered. "I don't know what that was. I shouldn't . . . I don't know why I did that."

He loosened his arms enough to let her put some space between them, but didn't release her entirely. "Tension does weird things to people, and laughter can end up being a safety valve. You feel any better?"

She let out a deep breath. "I guess I'd rather laugh than cry, at least when I'm not in front of other people. I just . . . the thought that this is the last time I'm ever going to see my mom . . ."

"I know." Tightening his arms again, he rested his chin on top of her head and sighed. "Your dad's going to get worried if we don't get going soon."

She nodded and pulled back, reaching for her purse. "Yeah, I know. I guess I'm as ready as I'm going to get."

He followed her to the door, then hesitated before opening it. "Alex?"

"Yeah?"

He crooked one finger and used it to tilt her chin up so he could kiss her gently. "She knew you loved her."

Alex was silent for a few seconds, then just nodded slowly and took his hand. "Let's go."


	23. Turning the corner

A/N: I was at a wake. Once. When I was six. So I'm basically working on imagination here - do let me know if I make any glaring mistakes in funeral ettiquette or anything

* * *

Alex was enveloped by her family within minutes of their arrival at the funeral home, and Bobby soon found himself alone at the side of the room. He hung back, watching people file past the coffin where Mary Eames lay and trying to plot a course for how to deal with Alex when they got home. He wasn't even sure if she'd go home crying or if she'd be feeling some amount of peace; he_ definitely_ didn't know how she was going to react to him or a possible conversation about his leaving. He needed all the brain cells he could dredge up to work on that problem; leaning back against a wall, he let his neurons go to work. 

He was so deep in thought, in fact, that he jumped, startled, when a voice said from beside him, "Why am I not surprised to see you here?"

Regaining control of himself, Bobby turned to look at the newcomer. "I don't know, sir. Why aren't you?"

Deakins rolled his eyes. "Remind me not to ask you an open-ended question like that again. You look good, Bobby. LA must agree with you."

"Hmm."

"You just back for the funeral?" he persisted. "Or am I finally going to get my best team back together?"

Bobby shook his head. "I'm here for Eames right now. I . . . don't know when I'll be back permanently."

"Well, how's your mother? You're waiting on her, right?"

He nodded. "She's doing well. Extremely well, actually. The drug trial, though . . ." He shrugged helplessly. "I don't know."

Deakins pondered that for a moment, then looked over his shoulder at where Alex stood with her arm around her father. "How's she doing?"

"She's coping. I've been trying to keep her from thinking too much about it."

"Riiight. And how's _that_ going?" he asked sarcastically.

The got a reluctant smile out of Bobby. They both knew that trying to keep Alex from doing anything she didn't want to do could be bad for a person's health. "A little better than you'd think, actually. I'm a novelty, I guess."

"Yeah, well, you wouldn't be such a novelty if you'd just move your ass back to New York, where you belong."

Deakins had the bit in his teeth now; he wasn't going to let go until Bobby gave him _something _on this topic. With a sigh, he shrugged. "I'm trying, Captain. Believe it or not, I do miss home."

The older man nodded, satisfied by that, at least for the moment. "You really have no idea when the drug thing will be over?"

"No. I could theoretically . . . you know, before . . . but there's logistics to be handled, and -"

"But?" Deakins echoed incredulously. "_But_? You're a smart guy, Bobby. If you wanted to come home, you could work out the logistics - so what's stopping you?"

"Sir . . ."

"Look," Deakins cut in, "if you and Eames are having problems, we can work that out. I know she wants you back as much as I do."

_He knew? _The captain had never even hinted that he might know about the relationship between the two detectives, and now it turned out he _knew_? Horrified, Bobby could only stare at him, wondering what revelations would come out of his mouth next.

"What?" Deakins said, noticing and promptly misinterpreting his discomfort. "You guys were on the skids even before you moved; I'm just saying, if you haven't resolved whatever it was, I'll get Eames to work with you on it. Partners fight," he added with a shrug when Bobby's face didn't change. "So stop looking like you think I'm going to split you up just because I know you did."

False alarm, he thought with a mental sigh. Moments later, he was saved from having to respond to Deakins's statement by the appearance of the woman in question at his elbow, looking pale but composed. "Bobby, could you . . . Oh, uh, hi Captain." She offered him a weak smile. "Thank you for coming."

Deakins nodded politely and laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. "She was a hell of a women, Alex. I'm sorry she's gone. My thoughts are with you and your dad." He paused, noticing a look that passed between the partners, then nodded his head toward Bobby and asked, "Sorry, did you need him?"

"Yeah, if you can spare him."

"He's yours," he said with a wave of his hand. "Didn't mean to monopolize the guy."

Alex gave him a distracted smile and, without further comment, took Bobby's arm and pulled him away.

Halfway across the room, he dug in his heels and forced her to a stop. "What's wrong?"

She looked at him blankly for a second, then realized that their hasty retreat was a little _too _hasty to be normal. "Nothing's wrong. I just . . . need you."

Surprised by her frank admission, Bobby just nodded and lifted her hand off his arm so he could take hold of it, instead. "Oh. Ok, you've got me."

"Thank you," she said quietly, leading him out of the room and into the hallway. "I just need a minute away from my family . . . and all the people . . ."

He sensed that she wouldn't appreciate his trying to convince her that no one would think less of her for letting her emotions show at her mother's funeral, so he just nodded again and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. Let her have her time, he thought; she'd speak again when she was ready to.

Alex closed her eyes and sighed, shifting a little closer to him until she was pressed against his side with her head resting against his arm. "She looks . . . peaceful," she half-whispered after a few seconds. "Like she didn't mind dying. Did you see her?"

"Yeah." He paused, then added tentatively, "I think maybe she came to terms with dying well before it actually happened."

"After the first stroke, you mean?" she asked softly, looking up at him with what appeared to be polite interest.

Bobby knew he was treading on dangerous ground. They were talking about Alex's mother, not his, and everything he knew about the woman, he'd learned as an outsider who was just visiting the Eames household. He'd need to moderate his comments, so that it didn't sound like he was trying to tell her about _her _mother. "The stroke," he finally said, lowering his head so he could see her eyes, "yes. I mean, I always got the impression that she . . . she knew it would come, and she'd accepted that."

Swallowing, Alex nodded slowly. "Maybe she did. It's just . . . _I _didn't."

He had no answer for that, no way to make things look better. Using the arm he had around her shoulders, he pulled her into a tight hug, resting his cheek on her hair. "I know. I'm so sorry, honey."

She buried her face in his shoulder and wrapped her arms around his waist so quickly that he wondered if she'd just been waiting for him to give her the opportunity to do it, and he could tell the exact moment that she finally let go of the self-control she'd been clinging to all evening - her body seemed to go limp and he suddenly found himself supporting most of her weight. She let out a shaky breath, the air warm against his shoulder, and as he continued to hold her, he could feel the wet of her tears soaking through his shirt.

"Alex . . ." he murmured, not really expecting an answer and not getting one, as he used one hand to cradle the back of her head gently.

It felt like only seconds later that there was a quiet cough from behind them and Webster appeared at Bobby's elbow, expression watchful. "Sorry," he told the younger man, keeping his voice low and his eyes on what he could see of Alex. "Uh, Alex?"

Alex, who had been too sunk in her pain to hear the warning cough, started at hearing her name and quickly raised a hand to wipe away her tears before lifting her head off Bobby's shoulder and facing the newcomer.

Webster, not an idiot, pretended as best he could that he didn't notice her spiky lashes or wet cheeks. Giving her a rueful smile, he backed up a step and nodded to her. "Your dad sent me to find you and make sure you were ok. Which, I guess," he went on, glancing at Bobby and then looking back at her, "you are. Thankfully."

"I, uh . . ." Although she dropped her arms from around Bobby, she didn't pull away from him as she made another furtive attempt to dry her tears. "I'm ok, yeah." Reluctant to look directly at Webster and let him see her face, she just nodded awkwardly, then looked up at Bobby and, meeting his eyes, said quietly, "We should probably get back."

Bobby studied her face for a long moment before deciding that she appeared slightly better for having let herself cry, and therefore she was probably steady enough to return to the crowd of people inside the room. "Ok," he said, nodding. "Whenever you're ready."

Webster, seeing that everything was well in hand, at least for the moment, patted her shoulder, smiled encouragingly, and turned to return to the main room.

She watched his retreating back for a second, then looked back at Bobby and smiled tremulously, laying a hand against his cheek. "Thank you. I . . . I really don't know what I would have done if you weren't here."

He turned his head slightly to kiss her palm. "You'd have survived, the same as you always have whether I'm with you or not."

She gave that a few seconds of thought, then looked up at him with dawning acceptance. "Yeah . . . Yeah, I guess I would have," she said slowly, taking his hand. "But I'm glad I don't have to do it _without_ you. Let's go back in. I don't want my dad to worry."


	24. Broken stitches

A/N: Continuity correction: I just realized that I gave Alex a one-bedroom apartment (thus Bobby sleeping on the couch the first night), but in one chapter I put the dog in a spare bedroom that magically appeared. So yeah...oops. Let's pretend that didn't happen and go back to the one-bedroom schema, shall we?

* * *

A heavy silence had fallen between them by the time the clock struck ten and Bobby gently took her keys from her and unlocked the door of her apartment. "C'mon," he murmured, laying a hand against the small of her back to urge her forward when she didn't seem to realize the door had been opened. "You're exhausted; let's get you inside."

Moving automatically, she obeyed the pressure of his hand and stepped inside, then just stood and watched as he closed and locked the door behind them.

"Alex," he began, turning back toward her, "you need to . . ." Whatever other words he had been about to say died in his throat as he looked into her face. Always before, Alex had carried an air of stoicism about her, cloaking herself in it even in her worst moments, and even he, whom she trusted implicitly, had rarely been allowed more than a fleeting glimpse of the woman behind the curtain.

Now the mask had disintegrated. She was looking up at him with open vulnerability in her eyes, and suddenly, nothing else was more important to him than to wrap her in his arms and shield her from any more pain.

She accepted his hug willingly, pressing against him as if she was trying to burrow into him and leave the world behind, and sighed quietly into his shoulder.

Sensing her desire for shelter, he dropped his hands into the pockets of his coat and wrapped it around her, pulling her closer.

For a second, there was companionable silence as she settled into his embrace, and then her hands drifted down to his sides and she seized two fistfuls of his shirt, tugging it out of his pants so she could slide her hands under it and flatten them against his stomach.

Bobby tensed at her touch, unsure of what she was doing and why, but knowing he wouldn't be able to bring himself to pull away, no matter what her motivation was. Instead, he willed himself to relax, silently giving her permission to touch him as much as she needed.

Alex, content to feel a warm body against hers, did nothing save move her hands across his skin for what seemed like a very long time, but even so, Bobby quickly found himself gritting his teeth and willing his libido to hell. _She's looking for comfort, you idiot, not a quick lay. The woman's burying her mother tomorrow, for the love of god, and all you can think about is how much you hope one of her hands will slip a few inches? Classy, Goren, real classy._

And then, as if she'd heard his thoughts, Alex suddenly flexed one of her hands against his abdomen and casually allowed gravity to begin to pull her fingertips down toward the waist of his pants.

He swallowed a groan and grabbed the errant hand, trying to pull it back to safety. "We should get some sleep."

"I'm not tired," she replied without looking up.

"You fell asleep in the car on the way home, Alex. You're beyond tired."

"I'm fine," she repeated, taking her hands off him and stepping back. "You can go to bed if you want. I'm probably not going to sleep tonight anyway."

Well, that was likely enough, he supposed, given where they'd spent the evening. Still, there was no way he was going to blithely head off to bed and leave her alone with her thoughts. "Ok," he told her, countering her step back with a small step forward, just far enough to bring him within arm's reach of her again, "but if you're not going to sleep at all, what _are _you going to do for the rest of the night?"

Sighing, she turned away, slipping her fists into the pockets of her jacket and using them to repeatedly pull the material out from her sides, then back in again.

She looked like she was trying to fly away, Bobby thought as he watched the jacket flap back and forth, and although he knew she was actually just trying to keep her hands busy, he suspected that she just might actually consider taking off and flying away if she could. "Alex -"

"They want you back," she said abruptly, not slowing her jacket-flapping, "don't they."

Blindsided by the question, Bobby could only stare blankly at her. Or rather, he stared blankly at her back, since she still wasn't turning to face him. "Who?"

"Your _job_, Bobby," she snapped. "That thing you spend most of your life doing. That's why Riley called you tonight, right? He wants his partner back and now you need to get yourself out of here."

How could he answer something like that? Obviously, she'd seen through the semi-cryptic, _I'll try to find out _he had given Riley. She knew that at least part of the conversation had been about his returning to LA, and she'd pounce on him in a flash if he tried to deny it now. But with the mood she was in, he very much doubted that she'd allow him to explain the facts of the conversation as they had actually been, either. "Yes, he asked when I was coming back," he admitted with a sigh. "But what he _also_ asked was how you were doing. He doesn't want to get his partner back at _your_ expense." There, that had sounded reasonable, right? She'd have to at least try to understand it.

"When are you leaving?" she asked flatly, seeming to either not have heard or not have cared about his attempt at an explanation.

"What?"

"When. Are. You. Leaving," she repeated impatiently. "It's not that hard a question."

Confounded by her hostility, Bobby blurted out the only thing he could think of to say: "Are you even _listening _to a word I'm saying, Alex?"

She slipped her hands out of her pockets then and turned around, only to cross her arms defiantly as soon as he caught her eye. "Yeah, I'm listening. But if you hadn't noticed, you're being very careful to say absolutely nothing that _means _anything. Telling me what Riley thinks is not a substitute for telling me what you think."

"Alex . . ."

"Just answer the question, Bobby. Are you leaving, or aren't you?"

"I . . ." With a sigh of resignation, and fully cognizant of the firestorm he was about to ignite, he did as she asked and answered the question: "You know I have to, eventually. I can't just never show up to work again. And there's my mother to consider."

For a second as he watched her react to his statement, he thought she was going to hit him, but before he could come up with a way to head off that disaster, she took a step away from him, visibly trying to contain her emotions. "Your mother," she finally said stiffly. "Of course."

_I should know by now that she's more important to you than I am_. The unspoken words resounded in Bobby's head, and he knew she hadn't voiced the thought only because they both knew she didn't have to.

"Alex," he tried again, holding onto both his composure and his temper only by sheer force of will, "you're putting words in my mouth. If you would just let me explain -"

"What's to explain?" she snapped. "You answered my question and now I know you're going back to California. End of discussion."

_End of discussion_? Was that really what she had just said to him? Of course it was, his brain informed him, and that flippant attempt to dismiss him was the straw that broke the camel's back. "Bullshit!" he exploded as what remained of his temper took a swan dive out the window. "It's not the 'end' of anything; you just _want_ it to be."

"Oh, I want it to be?" she shot back sarcastically. "Why didn't I think of that? Of _course _I started this because I wanted to be told that nothing's changed and this whole week has been a joke!"

"A _joke_?" he echoed harshly. "Do I look like I'm amused by this, Alex? I didn't go looking for this fight - _you _did. So tell me, exactly whose joke _is_ this?"

"Not mine!"

"Well it's not mine, either, so stop trying to blow this out of proportion!"

Alex just stared at him for a second. "Oh, _right_," she finally said sardonically. "I don't know what could have possibly made me think I had the right to know anything about your plans. How dare I get upset when I find out you're running away yet again?"

"Damnit, Alex . . ."

"What?" she challenged. " 'Damn it,' what? Stop making a scene? Or maybe I'm intruding on your recreation time and you just want to go to _bed_, huh?"

"No!" Before she could back out of his reach, he grabbed her arm and dragged her closer, not bothering to be gentle about it. "If you weren't so busy trying to make yourself out to be the victim here, maybe you'd actually consider listening to what I'm trying to tell you, but I guess you must be enjoying yourself too much to be concerned with a little thing like that!"

"Let me go!" she snarled, trying to jerk away from him. "Believe me, I heard every word you said. Why do you think I'm so pissed?"

"Fine." Without warning, he released her arm and watched, forcing himself not to intervene, as she stumbled backward, trying to counterbalance the momentum of her own pull. "Go back to your ivory tower and keep telling yourself that I was just going to leave and not look back. I hope you have fun."

"What the hell else am I supposed to think?" she managed, finally regaining her balance and being careful to stay a few feet away from him now. "You're the one who _said _you're going back, remember?"

"Drop it, Alex. I'm too tired to keep trying to convince you of something you obviously don't want to believe. You win, ok?"

"No!"

"Yes." And with that, he started to turn away, only to find a small hand clamped around his wrist.

"So help me, Bobby, if you're going to try to walk out of this apartment again . . ."

Making no move to shake off her hand, he simply raised his eyebrows. "If I try to walk out again, what?" he said coolly. "If you're going to make a threat, be sure you finish it, so we both know where we stand."

"I . . ." She blinked, taken aback by the demand. "I don't know. I'll think of something."

He pried her fingers off his wrist. "Let me know when you do."

"Bobby!"

Annoyed at both her and himself, he shook his head. "I'm not leaving the apartment, ok? But I'm also not continuing this farce of a conversation. Go to bed, Alex. You're tired. This wasn't a good night to get into a fight."

"Well _excuse _me for wanting to know where I stand," she retorted indignantly.

Bobby sighed. "You stand exactly where you've always stood with me, and if you don't know where that is . . . then I don't know what else I can tell you." When she opened her mouth to respond to that, he held out a hand to stop her. "Don't. Just go to bed, ok? I promise I'm not going to sneak out while you're asleep."

She gave that a few seconds of consideration, then looked at him suspiciously. "If I go to bed, what are _you_ going to do?"

He shrugged. "Go to sleep. Out here," he added, nodding at the couch, when she looked nervously over her shoulder at the bedroom.

"The couch is -"

"The couch is fine," he interrupted firmly. "Would you really want me in bed with you tonight, anyway?"

The irony, she realized suddenly, was that she would. She did. Even after this vicious argument. Thatwasn't the right answer, though; she could see it on his face. He didn't want to sleep with her and he was, naturally, assuming that she felt the same. "Whatever," she finally muttered quickly, turning away from him before he could read her emotions in her eyes.

Bobby nodded silently and watched her retreat to the bedroom, but even as angry as he was, he couldn't stop himself from calling out before she closed the door behind her, "Alex?"

She paused in the doorway, turning to face him with hooded eyes. "Yes?"

"Whether you choose to believe it or not, I love you."

She stiffened in response to that, then forced herself to relax. Hoping he hadn't noticed the involuntary reaction, she raised her eyes to meet his for a fleeting second as she nodded jerkily.

In the next second, she softly shut the door between them.

* * *

A/N: Fear not, readers - I promise, things aren't as bad as Alex thinks they are. Things are coming to a head now . . . will he go? Will he stay? Will she drive him away before he gets around to choosing? 


	25. A full recovery

The apartment was dark and he couldn't hear any sounds coming from the other side of the door that separated him from her. He had seen the light under the door go out half an hour ago, and now, still wide awake, Bobby lay on his back on the couch, hands behind his head, and tried to convince himself to fall asleep.

Canis, who had had the bad luck of being outside the bedroom when Alex shut herself in, lay on the floor next to the couch, occasionally half-sitting up to nose Bobby's elbow, as if to remind him that he wasn't the only one who couldn't sleep. The dog, it seemed, had been almost as disturbed by the argument as the man had, and although Bobby's elbow was beginning to feel rather slimy, he found himself glad for the company. Being startled every now and then was keeping him from sinking completely into the internal debate that was raging in his head.

He'd been nearly shaking with the force of his anger when he'd first laid down, and while the trembling had subsided now, the bitterness was still alive and well. How dare she jump to the conclusion that he was going to disappear again, when he'd done everything but kiss her feet this week in an attempt to make up for leaving the first time? Their rift hadn't even been completely his fault in the first place, not with the deliberate way she'd cut off all communication with him, but had he said anything about her part in it? Of course not.

He'd tried to atone for the way he'd left her. He'd been willing to shoulder all the blame for the sake of peace between them, and he'd thought that she had accepted that. It would be selfish on her part, maybe, but he could have dealt with that.

What he couldn't deal with was the way she'd almost eagerly assumed the worst about him tonight, refusing to even allow him to explain before flinging accusations at him. It wouldn't have mattered whether he'd been about to tell her that he was leaving tomorrow or that he'd told Riley to go find a new partner and leave him alone; either way, she'd had him tried and convicted before he even opened his mouth.

And yet . . . the woman's mother was dead. Her emotional resilience at the moment was almost nil, and this week had been a violent upheaval for her in more than one way. He'd known almost from the start that he would have to allow her substantial leeway in her behavior, to compensate for the grief she was feeling.

He'd also known that she was still trying to decide whether to allow him fully back into her life. When he'd finally deciphered the occasional pained looks that appeared on her face when she spoke to him, he'd realized with a shock that they corresponded to the moments in their conversation that might have reminded her that he would eventually have to return to his other life.

Completely independent of whether she'd forgiven him or not, he'd come to understand, she was, quite simply, terrified of being left alone again - and Alex didn't like being afraid. If he had just pulled himself out of the all-sins-forgiven fantasy he'd been letting himself wallow in and stopped to think about it, he could have foreseen that she would lash out at him rather than acknowledge her fear, to him or to herself, and not allowed himself to be infuriated when she did it.

And yet, fear or not, theirs had once been a relationship dependent on trust, and always in the past, no matter how upset she'd been, she'd been willing to listen to him. Disagreed with him or overruled him afterward, maybe, but always listened. Her refusal to do so tonight felt almost malicious, and he wasn't entirely sure that that had been unintended. The lack of trust, the assignment of blame . . . even if she'd been shaken to the core by her mother's death, she still had to know that those things were counterproductive, and she'd ambushed him with them anyway.

A wet nose touched his arm and Bobby blinked, pulling himself out of his thoughts and leaning over to scratch the dog's ears. "What am I gonna do, huh?" he asked Canis softly. "I can't even tell if she wants me to stay here; how am I supposed to decide whether I should or not?"

Silence from the dog, and with a groan, Bobby swung his legs around and sat up. There was no way he was going to get any sleep tonight, not with all the debates and decisions circling his head.

The simple point Deakins had made at the funeral home had refused to be driven from Bobby's head ever since he'd heard it: _he_ was the only one keeping himself in California. If he wanted so much to return to New York . . . why didn't he?

And he'd realized, sometime as he watched her drift into an exhausted sleep on the way home tonight, that if he was the one holding himself back, he was the one who would have to give himself his freedom. He wanted his life back; he wanted his partner back; he wanted his old haunts and old friends back.

What he didn't want was to hurt Alex, or to torture himself. Everything would rest on her, he'd decided. He had to find out whether she wanted him back, in all ways, as much as he wanted her. If she did, he'd return to LA only long enough to settle his affairs before coming back to New York. And if she didn't . . . well, his life in California was tolerable. He'd intended to, somehow or other, ask her tonight how she felt about his returning.

Instead, they'd ended up in a raging argument, and what worried him now was one simple possibility:

What if that had been her answer?

Sighing, he flopped back down on the couch and threw an arm over his eyes.

A few minutes later, he'd fallen asleep in spite of himself.

* * *

It was useless. She just wasn't going to be able to get more than a few minutes sleep at a time in her current state of mind. For the fourth time since she'd climbed into bed that night, Alex opened her eyes and sat up, staring into the darkness. No sounds were coming from the other side of the door, where she'd left Bobby. She supposed he was probably sleeping easy, glad that he didn't have to deal with her. 

Why had she exploded at him? She'd been the one to ask him the question, after all. It was perverse to penalize him for answering it honestly.

Fuck that. She'd be as perverse as she wanted; _she _wasn't the one who was planning on hopping a plane and moving out to the other side of the country again. _She _wasn't the one who'd come back just long enough to blast a gaping hole in her ex-lover's defenses, and then not bothered to even try to deny that she was leaving.

_Be fair, Alex_, broke in her conscience. _He was so indignant about my reaction, so upset that I assumed he "wouldn't look back" . . . really, he didn't seem very pleased about having to say that he was going to leave_.

Ok, so he had known she would react badly and he'd been reluctant to deal with it. That didn't change the fact that he was leaving.

". . . _keep telling yourself I was just going to leave and not look back,_" she heard him say again in her head. Why did that sentence bother her so much?

It probably had something to do with the fact that it implied that he _didn't _intend to leave her, she realized with a start after a second. But then why had he said he _was _going to leave?

With a groan, she flopped back against the pillows. Damn her and her uncontrolled reaction, and damn him and his self-righteous anger. This was getting her nowhere.

_He's right on the other side of the door, Alex. You're the one who shut it; all you have to do is open it again_.

What if he didn't want to see her? She'd rarely seen him as angry as he had been tonight. He was probably wishing her to hell.

But what the hell had he been trying to tell her before he lost patience and gave up?

Unable to resist the combination of curiosity and guilt that was now flowing through her, she slid out of bed and pulled on a t-shirt. If he was still willing to talk, she'd listen.

* * *

Bobby wasn't sure what woke him up. It might have been a sound, or it might have just been his cop sense warning him that he wasn't alone, but whatever it was, he was on his feet almost before he opened his eyes. 

Alex, who had been trying to approach his sleeping form as quietly as she could, recoiled in shock at the sudden movement and stumbled over her own feet.

Moving quickly, Bobby grabbed her arm to keep her from falling, pulling her closer to him. "What are you doing out here?"

"I . . ." Trying to regain her composure, she stared up at him through the semi-darkness. "I thought maybe we could talk."

He swiftly dropped her arm and turned away. "You've got to be kidding me."

"No, I'm not." Reminding herself that it was she who had fucked up their first attempt at this conversation, she followed him as he moved away. "Look, I freaked out on you before. I'm sorry. It's just . . . this hasn't been a good night. I didn't want to hear any more bad news."

"I wasn't planning on giving you any more bad news." He hesitated, then sighed. "At least, I wasn't _then_."

The implication in that statement was clear, and Alex forced herself to take a deep breath and let it out before she spoke. "I take you that you are now, then?"

"I don't know!" Dragging an agitated hand through his hair, he turned back toward her, but kept his eyes away from hers. "I don't know, Alex. All you seem willing to believe is bad news. I'm starting to wonder if maybe that _is _what you want to hear."

"No." Moving before she could talk herself out of it, she closed the distance between them and took his chin in her hand, forcing him to look down at her. "What I want to hear now is what you were trying to tell me before. Whatever it was."

Closing his eyes, he pushed her hand away from his face. "I'm not doing this again unless I know you're going to hear me out this time."

"I am, ok?" Seeing that he still looked skeptical, she dropped down onto the couch and crossed her arms, giving him a stubborn look. "Try me."

He continued to search her face for a few more seconds before sighing and sitting down next to her almost reluctantly. "Riley called to tell me that our lieutenant is getting impatient. He's not happy about me keeping my time here open-ended, and he's leaning on Riley to get to me. What I was saying before . . . I _have _to go back. I have to get things hashed out at work."

"Bobby -"

Holding up a hand, he shook his head. "Let me finish."

Alex was uneasy about what else was going to come out of his mouth, but she'd promised to listen. She reluctantly nodded her understanding.

"There's also no way I could just not go back and leave my mom out there. Her doctors are used to dealing with me. There are things that have to be . . . worked out."

None of this sounded any different from what he'd said before. Had she been right after all? Swallowing, Alex forced herself to do nothing other than give him a politely questioning smile.

"I have to go back," he said again, looking down at his hands. "But what I was trying to tell you . . . I don't have to _stay _back."

"What?" she managed after a second, sure he could hear in her voice how shaken she was by that simple statement.

He glanced up at her, shrugged, then quickly looked away again. "There's something my mother has been telling me since she found out about you and me . . ."

Alex blinked. His mother? What would she have said with regard to Bobby's move?

"She said she's old news," Bobby went on, hardly noticing her confusion. "That whether I live near her or not, she knows I love her, and therefore I should . . . I should be less concerned about staying near her than staying near you. When you called . . . about your mom . . . she looked at me and told me that she didn't need me anymore, but you did."

"Oh." She stared at him for a second, then realized that she wasn't quite sure whether he had just made an important point or not. "Meaning . . . what?"

With a self-conscious chuckle, he looked up at her and smiled weakly. "Meaning that she took away my excuse for staying in LA. Also meaning that I think she'd kill me if I tried."

"Oh," she managed again.

He waited for her to say something else, growing more and more nervous when she didn't. "Deakins . . . kind of said the same thing when I talked to him tonight," he stumbled on after an uncomfortable minute. "He said if I really wanted to be back here, I'd have gotten things straightened out and come back."

"He _said_ that to you?" she couldn't stop herself from asking. "Tonight?"

"Yeah, And I realized that he was right and if I wanted move back here, there was nothing to stop me, except me . . . and you."

"Me?"

"Yeah, you. I mean . . ." He shrugged. "I think it's fair to say that at this point, both of us are involved in this. And I didn't want to decide without finding out first whether you were, you know . . . whether you would rather have me stay or go."

"_That's_ what you were going to say before I got mad?"

"Well, yeah. I was going to ask what you wanted. But then you were so quick to assume the worst, I thought maybe . . . that was my answer."

"Bobby, no," she breathed, reaching impulsively for his hands. "I was just so upset . . . after hearing you on the phone, and then my mom . . ."

"Don't," he broke in, tugging gently on her hands to get her to move closer. "I know you were. But Alex . . . I do need to know. I have to go back to work, if only for Riley's sake, and I have to know what to tell him and my lieutenant."

Alex was silent for a long moment. "Are you asking me if I want you to move back here?"

He hesitated for a moment and then said, "Yeah."

"And if I say yes . . . you will? You'll leave your mother out there alone?"

"Yeah," he repeated with a tense smile. "Like I said, I think she'd be mad if I didn't. And . . . and she made a point of telling me that she's not alone anymore. She's got friends at the hospital."

She looked at him closely, searching for the pain she would have expected his mother's assertion of independence to cause and finding none. "You're doing this for me?"

He shook his head, urging her toward him until he could put his arm around her. "_Because_ of you, yes. But 'for' . . . I think I'm doing it for me. My life is here, not in California."

"Ok . . ." she said, still not entirely sure she believed what he was saying. Well, the best way to find out was to call his bluff, she decided. "Then . . . 'yes'."

Bobby blinked. " 'Yes?' Just like that?"

That was as genuinely believable a reaction as she could have hoped for. She gave him a knowing smile. "Yeah, just like that. It's not a hard choice for me, Bobby. Is it for you?"

"I . . . no. No, it's not," he said slowly as the realization dawned on him that it really wasn't. Sometime between the morning he left California and the wake tonight, he had stopped being worried about his mother's ability to survive without him. He'd stopped caring about whatever allegiance he owed to the LAPD. Admittedly, he didn't feel very good about leaving a good cop like Riley without a partner, but Riley of all people seemed to be the most enthusiastically on board with his move.

"You're serious about this?" Alex asked, more from excitement now than doubt, as she wiggled out from under his arm and moved to straddle his legs, putting her face on level with his.

He brought up both hands to frame her face, pulling her in for a kiss. "Dead serious. I love you, Alex. I'm sick of trying to fight it."

She slid her arms around his neck, leaning her forehead against his, and said teasingly, "Yeah, well, I'm sick of you trying to fight it, too, buddy."

Bobby let out a muffled laugh and wrapped both arms tightly around her as he stood up. "Come on. If you're going to beat all the fight out of me, we might as well do it on something bigger than a couch."

"Mmm," she murmured, wrapping her legs around his waist and kissing his jaw as he carried her into the bedroom. "Close the door before the dog follows us in."

* * *

A/N: Wow. Once again, the end of one of my stories snuck up on me. But if it makes anyone feel any better, although this is basically the end of the story, there will be an epilogue coming to sum things up 


	26. Epilogue

_A few days later..._

Bobby's phone rang just as they settled with matching sighs into the back seat of the taxi. He glanced down at it, snickered, and then looked back up at her. "It's Riley."

"Well, answer it," she chided, raising her eyebrows expectantly. "I think you owe him an update."

"Yeah, yeah." Resisting the urge to make a face at her, he unfolded the phone and raised it to his mouth. "What, Riley?"

"Oh ho ho!" Riley chuckled sarcastically. "And he says that like I'm the one who owes him answers. What the hell are you doing, Bobby? You haven't answered your damn phone all day!"

"Uh, yeah, sorry. Been a little busy. Why, is something wrong?"

"_Wrong_!" Riley almost squeaked. "You're asking me what's _wrong_? Jesus, I've got my lieutenant halfway up my small intestine right now and you're asking me what's _wrong_?"

Bobby wondered if he'd be able to switch his phone to speakerphone mode without Riley hearing it, but a look at Alex's face told him that if Riley didn't hear the switch, he'd hear the increased laughter that would come if she could hear what he was saying. "He's been up your ass for a week. What's different about today?"

Riley made a noise of disgust. "He's going to kick you, Goren. He's got half the paperwork done already. Do you just not care anymore?"

"Ok, ok," Bobby said hastily as Riley's voice began to rise in both volume and pitch. "You want me to talk to him?"

"No, I want you to talk to my mother. _Hell_ yes, I want you to talk to him!"

Alex must have been able to hear that exclamation, Bobby realized as he noticed that next to him, she was desperately trying to smother a laugh. Giving her a warning look, he said loudly, "Fine, John. I'll talk to him. Look, I gotta go, and -"

"Don't you dare leave me twisting in the wind on this!"

"- and I'm sure you've got work to do. I'll talk to you later." With that, he slapped the phone closed and dropped it on the seat next to him, giving Alex a dirty look. "He probably heard you!"

Alex gave him an unapologetic smirk. "Good. You're torturing the poor man, Bobby!"

He snorted. "He deserves it for being a pain in the ass."

"Hah. You'll be lucky if he doesn't _kick _your ass when you show up at his desk."

"That," Bobby said as the cab pulled to a stop in front of his LA apartment, "is why you're going to stand between me and him."

"Wuss," she teased as she slid out of the car.

"Not a wuss." Following her, he slid across the seat and stepped onto the sidewalk. "Just a pragmatist."

Alex snorted.

* * *

_Later that day . . ._ Riley didn't bother to look up when the blonde woman stopped next to his desk. He wasn't expecting anyone, and the pair of jeans he could see out of the corner of his eye suggested that she wasn't anyone work-related. Probably someone's wife, he figured, trying to spot her husband's desk. 

The woman cleared her throat, and he glanced up, offered her a politely distracted smile, and returned his attention to the paperwork he'd been sorting.

She cleared her throat again, this time adding, "John Riley?"

Ok, maybe she was looking for him. He looked up again and started to say that he was Riley, then stopped with his mouth half-open as he tried to place the very familiar face of his visitor. "Uh, yeah?" he finally managed after a second, unable to pin down her identity.

The stranger - who, he noticed as he continued to study her, was quite attractive - gave him a sweet smile and said, "You know a Bobby Goren?"

Riley blinked.

The woman smirked and leaned against the corner of his desk, crossing her arms. "You don't recognize me? After all that time you spent stealing looks at my picture over Bobby's shoulder?"

"You . . ." He stared at her. "Alex?" When she nodded, he spun around in his chair to get a better look at her. "What the hell are you doing here?"

She grinned. "I'm supposed to mellow you out with my female charm so you don't kill Bobby when he shows up."

"Bobby . . . is going to show up?"

"I told you I'd talk to the lieutenant," Bobby said from behind him. "I didn't say how."

"Son of a bitch!" Riley exclaimed, quickly turning his chair toward the voice. "You could have told me you were in LA when I called you!"

Bobby attempted to look apologetic, but only half-succeeded. "Sorry. You made it too easy." Glancing over his shoulder toward the lieutenant's office, he added, "Is he here?"

"Of course. He's having too much fun beating up on me to take off."

"Good. I'm going to go talk to him."

Before Riley could get another word out, Bobby had turned and was striding away. Settling for the next-best option, he turned to Alex and gave her a hard look. "What the hell?"

She shrugged and walked around to what she assumed was Bobby's chair. "May I?"

"Yeah, go ahead," he said with a wave of his hand. "Ain't my desk. You going to tell me what the hell he's doing, or do I have to guess?"

Alex sighed and sobered slightly as she lowered herself into the chair. "Don't shoot the messenger, ok?"

"Depends on what the message is."

"Uh, well . . . in about ten minutes, you're going to be out a partner," she said with a hint of guilt in her voice.

He slumped back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. "I was afraid of that. So I guess you guys patched things up?"

Alex glanced over her shoulder at the office Bobby had disappeared into, where he could be seen through the glass wall gestulating wildly. "I think so, yeah. Listen, I'm sorry about this. I know you two got along. Bobby says you're the only partner besides me he's ever been able to really work with."

"Ah, well," Riley said dismissively, "I'm an easy guy to get along with. He works with me, keeps his ego out of the way of mine, and he carries around pictures of pretty girls. I've had worse partners."

Shaking her head, Alex laughed lightly. "I don't think you quite understand his history. Partners ditched him right and left before he came to Major Case. Certainly none of them would have covered for him for a week while he went across the country and did god knows what with some woman."

Riley cleared his throat and rubbed the back of his head nervously. "Well, see, about that . . ."

"You going to try to deny it?"

"No, but uh, there's kind of a hitch here. If Bobby weren't leaving now, he'd just be losing another partner anyway."

Alex stared at him in disbelief, eyes narrowing. "You were going to _drop_ him?"

"Not quite." Sighing, he looked away. "Look, don't tell him this, ok? He'll feel like it's his fault."

"He'll feel like _what's _his fault?" she snapped, no longer inclined to be patient with him now that he was revealing himself as a betrayer.

"My lieutenant . . . he's been pissed at me all week. He figures I know more about where Bobby was than I've been letting on. Which I did. Do."

"And . . .?"

"Uh, a couple minutes after I talked to Bobby today, the boss kind of lost his temper. Turns out he pulled my desk phone records and he knows I've been talking to him. He, uh . . ." He coughed. "He pulled me into his office and announced that if I was going to be insubordinate to my lieutenant, I could damn well go find another lieutenant to do it to."

She blinked. "He _fired _you? Why didn't you just tell him where Bobby was?"

"Because I told Bobby I wouldn't, damn it!"

It was Alex's turn to slump back in her chair. "You got yourself _fired _for him?"

"What would _you _have done?" Riley challenged, on the defensive now.

"I . . . oh."

"Exactly."

Slightly embarrassed to find herself feeling jealous over the fact that Bobby had another partner who was as loyal as she was to him, she looked down at her hands and picked at a hangnail.

"Uh, Alex?" Riley said, looking at her cautiously. "Like I said, it's not his fault and I don't want him - or you - to think I think it is."

Suddenly energized, Alex held up a hand to stop him. "Wait, wait, wait. You're telling me you have no job now?"

"Well, I'm sure he's not going to boot me out at the end of the day or anything . . ."

"But you don't work for the LAPD anymore."

"Uh, right."

She gave him a smile so bright he would have sworn it almost blinded him. "You got any strong attachments to the west coast?"

"Other than surfing?" Riley said, unsure of her point. "Not really."

"Ever been to Manhattan?"

"Ok, now wait," he said quickly. "You don't need to find me a job. I can do that on my own."

She spared him a glance, rolled her eyes, and said, "I'm not trying to find you a job. Well, at least not directly. I'm trying to find my partner a partner."

"You . . . huh?"

"I've got a partner in New York that I've been with since Bobby moved," she explained patiently. "His name's Webster, and when Bobby comes back, he's going to be on his own. He's a nice guy, you're a nice guy . . ." She shrugged. "I figured you might want to give it a try."

Riley let out a stunned laugh. "You're kidding me."

"Nope."

"Does your partner know about this?"

She smiled slightly. "Which one?"

"Hell, either of them!"

"Bobby won't mind," she said confidently. "He'll probably be glad he doesn't have to leave you out here high and dry. And Webster'll at least be willing to give you a chance."

Riley just continued to just stare at her, both charmed and perplexed by her spontaneous offer.

When Bobby returned to his desk a minute later, he found Riley looking still mildly stunned, and Alex watching him with a slight smile. "Well," he said, walking up to where she sat and resting a hand on her shoulder, "at least the lieutenant agrees with me."

"Agrees with you?" she asked, turning to see his face. "About what?"

"About the fact that I should get the hell out of here before he gets _really _angry and does something we'll both regret," he replied, looking amused. "John, look, I'm sorry about this -"

"No, no no!" Alex jumped to her feet, putting a hand on his chest to stop his apology. "You don't need to feel bad about him."

He looked at her blankly. "I don't?"

She grinned. "No. Turns out that you're not the only one your boss kicked out."

Connecting the dots, he turned to Riley. "Did he . . ."

"Oh, yeah," Riley said cheerfully, "and he enjoyed every second of it. But like Alex said, don't feel bad. You've got an efficient girl here, you know."

Bobby looked down at Alex. "Efficient?"

She coughed uneasily. "Well, I figured since I'm leaving Webster alone so I can partner up with you again, and now Riley doesn't have a partner or a job . . ."

"I see." He turned to Riley. "And you agreed to this?"

"Hey, if you're not cool with it," Riley said, quickly holding up his hands in submission, "that's fine. I can find myself a job out here pretty easy."

"No," Bobby said, beginning to look thoughtful, "I don't have a problem with it. Actually . . ." He gently pushed Alex back into the chair and leaned over to kiss her cheek. "Thanks."

To her own embarrassment, and to the amusement of the two men, Alex blushed. "Stop," she grumbled, trying to brush his hand off her shoulder. "We need to get back; we promised your mom we'd have dinner with her."

"Oh, she wants to escape now that she's done the dirty deed, eh?" Riley teased.

"Bite me," she replied, giving him a sour look.

He leaned forward as if he was considering actually obeying the joking command. "Any time, sweetheart."

Bobby cleared his throat pointedly.

"Uh, right," Riley went on hastily, taking in his soon-to-be-ex-partner's lowered eyebrows. "You guys better get going. I gotta start cleaning out my desk and . . . uh, yeah, you'll just be in the way."

Bobby nodded slightly, satisfied with that response.

Heaving a tolerant sigh at his not-so-subtle possessiveness, Alex elbowed him aside and stood up. "I'll talk to my partner tonight," she told Riley. "And then I'll have Bobby call you and we can work out the details."

"Uh, sure." Still trying to process the events of the past few minutes, he could only nod and watched as the two turned to leave, their hands brushing in the process, then joining as they hit the doorway of the squad room.

_Fin

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A/N: Ok, that's really the end. Hope you guys enjoyed the ride!


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